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CHATHAM 



BY 

FREDERIC HARRISON 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1905 

All rights reserved 






COPYEIGHT. 1905, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1905. 



J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Introductory 1 



CHAPTER II 
Early Life 7 

CHAPTER III 
The Rising Orator 24 

CHAPTER IV 
The Aspirant for Office 44 

CHAPTER V 
In Subordinate Office 57 

CHAPTER VI 
First Ministry 75 

CHAPTER Vn 

Fall from Power . . . . . . . .119 

v 



vi CONTENTS 



CHAPTER VIII 

PAGE 

In Opposition 143 



CHAPTER IX 
The Chatham Ministry 169 

CHAPTER X 
Defence of Ireland and India 191 

CHAPTER XI 
Defence of the Constitution 206 ]/ 

CHAPTER XII 
Defence of America 225 

APPENDIX 238 



CHATHAM 



CHATHAM 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

Posterity, this is an impartial picture. I am neither 
dazzled by the blaze of the times in which I have lived, nor f 
if there are spots in the sun, do I deny that I see them. It 
is a man I am describing, and one, whose greatness will bear 
to have his blemishes fairly delivered to you — not from a 
love of censure in me, but of truth ; and because it is history 
I am writing, not romance. 

Such was the judgment passed on Chatham by a 
hostile contemporary, whose Memoirs were withheld 
from the public eye for nearly a century after their 
compilation. In these words Horace Walpole sums up 
his incisive character of " the terrible cornet of horse " 
whom Sir Eobert Walpole attempted to muzzle, of 
the aspiring orator who contributed so much to the 
fall of Sir Eobert, of the imperious statesman who 
finally succeeded to more than the power of Walpole 
at his zenith, reversed his policy, and entirely recast 
the international position of Great Britain in the 
world. 

In eight centuries our country has known but four 
great creative statesmen : men who, to use the words 
of a well-known historian, have been " founders or 
creators of a new order of things." William the 

B 1 



2 CHATHAM [chap. 

Conqueror made all England an organic nation. Ed- 
ward the First conceived and founded Great Britain. 
Cromwell made the United Kingdom and founded our 
Sea Power. Chatham made the Colonial System and 
was the founder of the Empire. For good and for evil, 
through heroism and through spoliation, with all its 
vast and far-reaching consequences, industrial, eco- 
nomic, social, and moral — the foundation of the Empire 
was the work of Chatham. He changed the course of 
England's history — nay, the course of modern history. 
For a century and a half the development of our coun- 
try has grown upon the imperial lines of Chatham's 
ideals ; and succeeding statesmen have based the key- 
note of their policy on enlarging the range of these 
ideals, in warding off the dangers they involved, in 
curbing or in stimulating the excesses they bred. 

Frederick of Prussia said of Chatham, "England 
has long been in labour, and has suffered much to 
produce Mr. Pitt: but at last she has brought forth 
a man." By France, the rise and fall of Chatham was 
watched as equivalent to the loss or the gain of 
a decisive campaign. His hyperbolic self-will, his 
almost grotesque arrogance, seemed excused by the 
deference of all with whom he acted, and the timidity 
of all whom he confronted. Contemporary memoirs 
ring with anecdotes of his personal ascendency and 
the terror he inspired at home and abroad. When 
Chatham said to a colleague, "I know that I can 
save this country, and that no one else can," it 
was not regarded as arrogance and presumption, but 
was treated as simple truth, which no doubt it was. 
Walpole's famous character of Chatham, from which a 



i.] INTRODUCTORY 3 

sentence heads this chapter, runs thus : " The admirers 
of Mr. Pitt extol the reverberation he gives to our 
councils, the despondence he banished, the spirit he 
infused, the conquests he made, the security he affixed 
to our trade and plantations, the humiliations of 
France, the glory of Britain carried under his minis- 
trations to a pitch at which it never had arrived — and 
all this is exactly true." 

In his own age and in ours, Chatham has cast a 
spell over men's minds, and has usually been spoken 
of in superlatives of praise and of blame. In West- 
minster Abbey we read, that it was during his adminis- 
tration that Great Britain was exalted " to a height 
of prosperity and glory unknown to any former age." 
In the Guildhall we read that William Pitt was raised 
up by Providence "as the principal instrument in 
His memorable work." Both these public monuments 
were erected many years after the statesman's fall 
and retirement. The first was ordered by Parliament 
under the ministry of Lord North, whom Chatham 
so fiercely opposed and denounced. The second in- 
scription was composed by Edmund Burke, his oppo- 
nent and severe judge. The French Abbe Eaynal, in his 
History of Indian Commerce (of 1780), declared that 
Chatham " raised the heart of England so high, that 
his administration was nothing but a chain of con- 
quests." Lord Brougham, in his Historical Sketches, 
tells us that Chatham " is the person to whom every 
one would point if desired to name the most successful 
statesman and the most brilliant orator that this 
country ever produced." Lord Macaulay, in many 
things his severest critic, in his fine description of the 



4 CHATHAM [chap. 

niouument in the Abbey, concludes that " history, 
while for the warning of vehement, high, and daring 
natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliber- 
ately pronounce, that, among the eminent men whose 
bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, 
and none a more splendid name." In our own time 
Mr. J. E. Green is fascinated by "the personal and 
solitary grandeur" of Chatham, "by the depth of his 
conviction, his passionate love of all he deemed lofty 
and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginativeness," 
"his purely public spirit." "He loved England with 
an intense and personal love. He believed in her 
power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learned 
to believe in herself." Mr. Lecky has said: " With all 
his faults he was a very great man — far surpassing 
both in mental and moral altitude the other politicians 
of his generation." As Lord Shelburne, the colleague 
and successor of Chatham, records that he was a man 
" of a most extraordinary imagination," so the descend- 
ant and historian of Shelburne speaks of the great 
orator "as the eternal monument of the highest 
eloquence employed on the noblest objects." 

The reverberation of these achievements has passed 
away. The long and crowded epoch of Chatham's son 
tended to make men forgetful of the father, who far 
outlived the span of his own power ; and the tremen- 
dous events that followed the French Eevolution and 
the Empire of Napoleon overshadowed the reign of 
George n. But history will continue to dwell with 
praise or with blame, with sympathy or with sorrow, 
on the lonely chief who breathed a new soul into his 
countrymen, who planted the saplings which have 



i.] INTRODUCTORY 5 

grown into a mighty forest, who inspired that passion 
for transoceanic expansion which has led to such 
energies, such miseries, such glory, and such heart- 
burning. 

There seem to be peculiar difficulties in attempting 
to write the life of a statesman whose work so many 
of our statesmen have sought to imitate, whose 
methods and doctrines so many others have con- 
demned. Chatham is usually regarded as pre-eminently 
a "war minister." And undoubtedly he " organised 
victory " on a scale greater than that achieved by any 
other English statesman. Though he never saw a 
battle-field in his life, he is reported to have said that 
" he loved honourable war." If he loved war for itself, 
as Alexander and Napoleon did, it is an indelible blot 
upon his name. The great-grandson of Chatham's 
colleague and successor, speaking before Chatham's 
monument in the Guildhall of London, has in our 
generation denounced "the scourge and calamity of 
a needless war." But it must not be forgotten that 
Chatham's wars were singularly sparing of blood, 
suffering, and ruin, to the victors as to the conquered. 
They have resulted in permanent conquests and 
settlements unexampled in modern history. The 
memory of these results has too often obscured the 
magnificent and far-seeing efforts of Chatham towards 
international justice, domestic reform, and peaceful 
progress. In many of the aims of good government 
he anticipated the work of his successors. In ages to 
come, this perhaps will be his true glory. Mr. Lecky 
has said: "No minister had a greater power of 
making a sluggish people brave, or a slavish people 



6 CHATHAM [chap. i. 

free or a disaffected people loyal." Of how many of 
our statesmen could this noble eulogy be passed? 
But, as Walpole reminds us, such a man must be 
painted as he was, with all his faults and all his 
failures. The glamour of his personality is nothing to 
us now. We have " to write history, not romance." 



CHAPTEE II 

EARLY LIFE 

William Pitt was born on the 15th of November 1708, 
of an honourable and wealthy family, settled in the 
West of England. Until he entered Parliament at the 
age of twenty-six, nothing but a few bare facts have 
been recorded of his life ; nor have eulogists or critics 
given us a very definite picture of his boyhood and 
youth. It seems as if the majestic personality, which 
so deeply overawed his contemporaries, had caused 
his biographers to abstain from searching into the 
story of their hero's life, until he had become a strik- 
ing character in the political world. " Of his infancy 
and early youth I have not been able to collect any 
authenticated information," sighs the most obsequious 
of his biographers. For biographical purposes, " The 
Great Commoner" had no youth. The bare facts 
extant are soon told. 

William was the younger son of Eobert Pitt, M.P. 
for Old Sarum, who was the eldest son of Thomas 
Pitt, of Swallowfield, Berks, and of Boconnoc in Corn- 
wall, who was also M.P. for Old Sarum, his own 
borough. In the genealogy prefixed to the authorised 
Life, the Pitt family is traced back to Nicholas Pitt, 

7 



8 CHATHAM [chap. 

temp. Henry vii. (or Henry vi.), through a John Pitt, 
clerk of the Exchequer, temp. Elizabeth, a Thomas 
Pitt, seated at Blandford, Dorset, and another John 
Pitt, rector of Blandford, who was great-grandfather 
of the statesman. Lord Shelburne, who was himself 
a Fitzmauriee, in his autobiography says that Pitt 
was a younger son "of no great family." Lord 
Chesterfield called it a "very new family." But in 
the fulsome biography compiled by the Eev. Francis 
Thackeray — an uncle, by the way, of our great satirist 
— the <* respectability" of the Pitt family is vouched 
by the intermarriages of that house with men and 
women of rank and condition. The historian, whom 
his nephew might have classed as a " clerical snob," is 
indignant that the Earl of Chatham should be called a 
novus homo. He gives us a Sir William Pitt, 1636, 
ancestor of Lord Eivers, two Thomas Pitts, father and 
son, and a Ridgeway Pitt, all three Earls of London- 
derry, uncle and cousins of the statesman. He records 
also another uncle, John Pitt, as marrying the sister 
of Viscount Fauconberg, and an aunt, Lucy, who 
married James, first Earl Stanhope. "Be this as it 
may " — to use the formula of genealogists — it is clear 
that the Pitts were a race which, not being of the 
highest influence or descent, had been allied during 
some generations with families of rank and name. 

The most conspicuous of Chatham's ancestors was 
his grandfather, Thomas Pitt, who in an adventurous 
life of seventy-three years (1653-1726) amassed fortune 
and reputation abroad. There are so many traits of 
likeness between this bold adventurer and his grand- 
son, that the study of atavism demands a few words 



ii.] EARLY LIFE 9 

on his career. Thomas Pitt as a youth engaged him- 
self first as a sailor, and then in a miscellaneous trade 
in India, settled in Bengal, and for twenty years 
carried on a battle with the East India Company as 
an " interloper " on their monopoly. On one occasion 
he was bound over not to engage in illicit business in 
£40,000, on another he was fined £1000. He remained 
impenitent, irrepressible, and triumphant. Having 
brought the Company to terms, he was for twelve 
years Governor of Madras, which he successfully- 
defended against the ISTawab of the Carnatic. 1 He 
purchased estates in England, and was elected to the 
Parliaments of 1689, 1690, and 1695. From 1710 till 
1715 he represented Old Sarum. He was appointed 
Governor of Jamaica, but he did not go out to the 
island. " He always knew what to do, and he did it." 
He was a man of indomitable energy and infinite 
resource, by which he amassed considerable fortune, 
which he invested in English estates. 

Governor Pitt married Jane Innes, who, we are 
told, traced descent from James Stewart, Earl of 
Moray, natural son of James v. of Scotland; and 

1 During his stay at Madras he kept up a constant search for large 
diamonds, from which he obtained the name of "Diamond Pitt." 
His great coup was the purchase of the historic Pitt diamond, which 
he acquired in 1701 for £20,400. He sold it in 1717 to the Regent 
of France for £135,000. It weighed, before cutting, 410 carats, and 
it now weighs 136 carats. It is the second diamond in the world, and 
is still preserved in the State Jewels of France in the grand Apollo 
Gallery of the Louvre. It was recently valued at £480,000. Under 
the Empire, it was set in the hilt of Napoleon's sword of ceremony. 
Thus, by one of the ironies of history, the stone which bought a seat 
in Parliament for Chatham adorned "the sword of Austerlitz," 
which broke the heart of Chatham's son. 



10 CHATHAM [chap. 

patriotic Scots have made much of this legendary 
descent. Having amassed great fortune — and no 
doubt other speculations of his besides the diamond 
returned him seven hundred per cent, on his outlay — 
he settled in the West of England, and purchased from 
the widow of Lord Mohun, the famous duellist, the fine 
estate of Boconnoc in Cornwall. It lay on a tributary 
of the Fowey, four miles east of Lostwithiel, near the 
scene of the Eoyalist victory of Bradock Down in 
1643. Boconnoc — which is said to have the finest 
grounds in the county — is, however, but incidentally 
connected with Chatham. He was certainly not born 
there, as used to be said, for he was ten years old 
when his grandfather purchased the estate. Governor 
Pitt, who died in 1726, before Chatham was eighteen, 
devised Boconnoc to Eobert Pitt, his eldest son, who 
died in the following year; and then the estate 
descended to Thomas, the statesman's elder brother. 
It passed ultimately through the Grenvilles by mar- 
riage to the Fortescue family, who scrupulously pre- 
serve the Chatham memorials and portraits that remain 
there. 

It would appear from the Fortescue Papers {Hist. 
MSS. Com.) that the Governor himself was some- 
thing of a rough diamond. His spelling is original, 
and his style abrupt. And his family seems to have 
been both quarrelsome and thriftless. Eobert Pitt, 
the father of the statesman, the eldest of three 
sons of Governor Pitt, married Harriet Villiers, 
daughter of the fifth Viscount Grandison, of Ireland. 
They had two sons, of whom the statesman was the 
younger, and five daughters. Three of these daughters 



ii.] EARLY LIFE 11 

married gentlemen of good estate, and one of them 
became Maid of Honour to Queen Caroline. The 
critical Lord Shelburne declared that they were pro- 
fligate and mad. Thomas, the elder brother of 
Chatham, married the sister of the first Lord Lyttel- 
ton, of Hagley in Worcestershire, and became the 
father of the first Lord Camelford. Chatham himself, 
as we shall see, married the sister of Eichard Grenville, 
the first Earl Temple. This sketch will show us at 
once the family connections between the houses of 
Pitt, Villiers, Stanhope, Temple, Grenville, and 
Lyttelton. 

It is certain from the boobs of Trinity College, 
Oxford, that Chatham was born in the Parish of 
St. James, Westminster. Along with Chaucer, Bacon, 
Milton, Pope, and Byron, he serves to refute Carlyle's 
empirical law that " it is impossible but that a London- 
born man should not be a stunted one." Of the boy- 
hood of Chatham almost nothing is recorded, accept 
" a family tradition " which we fain would accept on 
the authority of an eminent relative. The first Earl 
Stanhope, general and statesman, who in courage, 
energy, and sagacity, bore some resemblance to Chat- 
ham, noticed the genius of the boy, his nephew by 
marriage, and would call him "the young Marshal." 
The " young Marshal " was sent to Eton at an early 
age, was on the foundation, and had for schoolfellows 
the first Lord Lyttelton, Henry Pox, the first Lord 
Holland, Henry Pielding, author of Tom Jones, and 
Charles Pratt, Lord Chancellor Camden. Lord Shel- 
burne, his colleague, relates that Chatham was " distin- 
guished at Eton," but that he took an unfavourable 



12 CHATHAM [chap. 

view of the school system. One of his sayings was : 
"He scarce observed a boy who was not cowed for 
life at Eton — a public school might suit a boy of 
a turbulent forward disposition " — a temperament 
which Chatham was not himself conscious that he 
possessed. But he certainly was not "cowed for life 
at Eton." From Eton he went to Trinity College, 
Oxford, where he entered as a gentleman-commoner 
in January 1727, when he was just eighteen. He 
was subject to gout even as a boy; and he suffered 
from it so severely whilst at Oxford that he left the 
University, and was advised to, travel. He did not 
take a degree, and spent some time in France and 
Italy. But he could not shake off the disease. During 
life he remained a martyr to it, and we shall see how 
cruelly the affliction reacted upon his whole nature 
and his public career. 

Feeble health, we are told, made young Pitt a 
reader, and he gave himself to history and the classics. 
The Latin verses he published at Oxford on the death 
of George i. in 1727, if we allow for a few solecisms 
or misprints, are not below the standard of such college 
exercises. Lord Stanhope tells us that the favourite 
authors of the young orator were Thucydides, Demos- 
thenes, and, in English, Bolingbroke and Barrow. He 
would translate the classics into fluent English prose ; 
he read and re-read Barrow's sermons, till he could 
repeat them by heart. He was also a constant reader 
of Spenser's Faery Queen. And he would read Shake- 
speare aloud to his family. Chatham never was a 
scholar in the strict sense: like most great orators, 
he was rather a poor writer, too often stilted and 



ii.] EARLY LIFE 13 

usually bald. Nor is there any evidence that he 
possessed any serious learning or natural gift for 
literature. But it is plain that his powerful mind 
had assimilated such history and poetry as was most 
akin to his nature. As Lord Stanhope tells us, he 
was early " warmed by the flame n of the records of 
the past and by the great books of the ancient and the 
modern world. 

Chatham's letters show us that he was full of the 
familiar classics, which he quotes continually and 
aptly. His letters to his nephew, the first Lord 
Camelford, give us the picture of a noble mind well 
read in the best authors. He assists him in translat- 
ing Virgil's Eclogues into verse. He insists on his 
reading the Aeneid " from beginning to ending." He 
hopes that he loves the Iliad and the Aeneid : they 
contain " lessons of honour, courage, disinterested- 
ness, love of truth, command of temper, gentleness of 
behaviour, humanity, and in one word, virtue in its 
true signification." He recommends Locke, Burnet, 
Bolingbroke, Lord Clarendon's History, May on the 
Parliament? Lord Granville, editing these letters, 
very aptly quotes Milton : — "I call that a complete 
and generous education which fits a man to perform 
justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices 
both public and private, of peace and war." That 
complete and generous education Chatham had. 

After his father's death, the elder brother having 
succeeded to the family estates, William Pitt embraced 
the profession of arms, and at the age of twenty-three 
he obtained a commission as Cornet in the Blues, 
apparently by the interest of its colonel, Lord Cobham, 



14 CHATHAM [chap. 

whose niece was the wife of his brother Thomas. 
Lord Chesterfield tells us that the income of the 
young soldier at this time was but £100 a year. Of 
his military career, which lasted only four years, we 
know nothing, nor need we indulge the speculations 
of his reverend panegyrist and his martial uncle that 
he would have gained glory as a great commander. 

He applied himself to the art of war with char- 
acteristic ardour, for he told Lord Shelburne that, 
as Cornet, there was not a military book he had not 
read through. If he had any such dreams himself, 
they were cut short in an unexpected and quite 
dramatic way. On February 7, 1735, William Pitt 
was returned as member of Parliament for Old 
Sarum, the proverbial "rotten borough," which had 
been bought by Diamond Pitt, and had been repre- 
sented by him and by Eobert Pitt, his son. William 
entered the House of Commons in the later years 
of Walpole's long administration, a time when a vehe- 
ment and determined opposition was led by William 
Pulteney, whose party were known as the " Patriots." 

The reign of Sir Eobert Walpole was now being 
slowly undermined, though his consummate skill as a 
tactician still maintained a dull, venal, fickle majority. 
His insatiable grasp of power had driven from his 
side all men of ability and force. The sinister genius 
of Bolingbroke scattered on all sides the seeds of dis- 
content. Wyndham led the opposition in a tone of 
fierce denunciation. Townshend, Pulteney, Chester- 
field, Carteret had left the veteran. His sagacious 
scheme of Excise had aroused such indignation in the 
nation that it was withdrawn to avoid an outbreak ; 



ii.] EARLY LIFE 15 

but the Duke of Bolton and Lord Cobham, who 
opposed it, were cashiered and deprived of their regi- 
ments by a scandalous abuse of ministerial pressure. 
The great minister's most successful policy — peace 
abroad and quiet business at home — had enriched 
the nation by leaps and bounds, whilst it irritated 
the King, alarmed the patriots, and met ceaseless 
ridicule from the public and the press. The Prince 
of Wales, the unlucky " Fred " of the Memoirs, natur- 
ally became the centre of opposition to his father 
and his father's counsellor. Eound him gathered the 
leaders of the Opposition, claiming to be the true 
" Old Whigs of the Revolution/' whose historic policy 
it was to curb the power of the Crown. Swift, Pope, 
Gay, Thomson, and Arbuthnot supplied the malcon- 
tents with brilliancy and satire ; and both within and 
without the Parliament, spasmodic attempts were con- 
tinually hatched to bring about a coalition with the 
Jacobite factions. In face of all these opponents, Sir 
Eobert still contrived to maintain his sinking autho- 
rity by a marvellous union of courage, energy, sagacity, 
and tact. 

It was the hour for the rise of a great orator, and 
the greatest orator who has ever trod the floors of 
Parliament had now appeared on the stage. When 
Sir Eichard Temple, of Stowe, had succeeded to a 
splendid estate and great influence by his family con- 
nections, he revived the title of Lord Cobham. His 
sister Hester married Eichard Grenville, and his sister 
Christian married Sir Thomas Lyttelton. Thomas Pitt, 
the elder brother, married a daughter of Sir Thomas, 
a sister of George, the first Lord Lyttelton, whilst 



16 CHATHAM [chap. 

William Pitt, the Chatham that was to be, married the 
second Hester, the daughter of Richard Grenville, the 
sister of George, the first Earl Temple. This was 
the famous cousinhood of the "Boy Patriots," who 
now formed a brilliant clique in society and in Parlia- 
ment. Leicester House, the abode of the Prince of 
Wales, was their Court. Their rendezvous in the 
country was the royal domain of Stowe, whose master 
was the uncle of George Grenville and of George 
Lyttelton, and whose two nieces married the two Pitts. 
William Pitt, Cornet in the King's own horse, 
entering the House of Commons as member for the 
family borough of Old Sarum, did not immediately 
show his powers. It was not till 29th April 1736 
that he made his maiden speech, when he supported 
Pulteney's motion for an address of congratulation to 
the King on the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales. 
The speech has been reported with absurd encomiums 
by his flatterers, and is denounced as "empty and 
wordy" by Macaulay. Empty and wordy it is, if we 
look on it as the conventional compliments on a royal 
marriage. If we consider the circumstances and the 
persons, it was a political attack of curious insolence. 
The marriage had been forced on the Prince by the 
King. Congratulations were moved, not by the King's 
friends, but by the bitter opponent of the dominant 
minister. It was supported with fulsome exaggera- 
tions by the avowed partisans of the Prince, a son who 
hated his father, and whom both his parents detested. 
To rise up and talk, as young Pitt did, of the King's 
"tender, paternal delight in indulging" his odious 
heir, of "the humble request of his submissive and 



ii.] EARLY LIFE 17 

obedient son/' when that son was meditating rebellion 
and the father was meditating how to disinherit the 
traitor — this was not the language of official compli- 
ment. And if we imagine this fierce irony rehearsed 
with all the sonorous dignity and the dramatic 
emphasis which gave such thrilling power to Chat- 
ham's eloquence, we can easily understand the effect 
it produced. 

At any rate the great minister took it as a formid- 
able challenge. We know from his biographer that 
the debate " gave great offence and tended still further 
to widen the breach w — between Prince's friends and 
King's friends, between the minister and his opponents. 
The " warm panegyric bestowed on the Prince," " the 
cold praises given to the King " — say rather, the out- 
rageous laudation of a mischievous fool, and the savage 
irony poured on a jealous monarch — struck home. 
Walpole, they tell us, declared, "We must muzzle 
this terrible Cornet of horse." Pitt was at once 
cashiered and his commission cancelled. Within a few 
weeks, " the supercession of Cornet Pitt " was recorded 
and filled up, as that of Lord Cobham had been 
cancelled three years before for opposing the Excise. 
Walpole had already tried seduction ; for Pitt himself 
told Lord Shelburne that Sir Eobert " had offered him 
the troop which was afterwards given to General 
Conway." As promises and rewards had not availed, 
the great corrupter now tried penalties. 

Sir Robert's cynical worldly wisdom did not quite 
measure the heroic temper of the tiro. He did not 
muzzle the terrible young cornet. He merely whetted 
his taste for blood. 



18 CHATHAM [chap. 

The soldier who thus had bounded into the front 
rank of parliamentary forces was now in his twenty- 
eighth year. Nature had given him every physical 
advantage. He was tall, with an elegant and com- 
manding figure. Grace and dignity marked every 
gesture and attitude. It is clear that Chatham from 
youth had studied to improve his natural gifts. 
Writing to his nephew at Cambridge, being himself a 
bachelor in middle life, he says, " Behaviour is of in- 
finite advantage or prejudice to a man." " Behaviour 
is certainly founded in considerable virtues." " As to 
the carriage of your person, be particularly careful, 
as you are tall and thin, not to get a habit of stoop- 
ing." Politeness, he says, is " benevolence in trifles 
or the preference of others to ourselves in little, 
daily, hourly occurrences in the commerce of life." 
" To inferiors, gentleness, condescension, and affability, 
is the only dignity." Good servants are "humiles 
Amici, fellow Christians, Conservi" 

We have ample records of the orator's person. The 
head was small and the countenance thin; the nose 
was aquiline and long; the eye "that of a hawk." 
All the descriptions record the wonderful power of 
that eye, in language which would be treated as ex- 
travagant were it not that its effect is vouched by so 
many competent witnesses. A Catholic lawyer who 
had seen Pitt thus describes him in that oft-cited 
passage : " In his look and gesture grace and dignity 
were combined, but dignity presided ; the ' terrors of 
his beak, the lightning of his eye/ were insufferable. 
His voice was both full and clear ; his lowest whisper 
was distinctly heard, his middle tones were sweet, rich, 



ii.] EARLY LIFE 19 

and beautifully varied ; when lie elevated his voice to 
its highest pitch, the House was completely rilled with 
the volume of the sound. The effect was awful, except 
when he wished to cheer and animate ; he then had 
spirit-stirring notes, which were perfectly irresistible. 
He frequently rose, on a sudden, from a very low to 
a very high key, but it seemed to be without effort. 
His diction was remarkably simple, but words were 
never chosen with more care n — " the terrible was his 
peculiar power. Then the whole House sank before 
him, — still, he was dignified ; and wonderful as was 
his eloquence, it was attended with this most im- 
portant effect, that it impressed every hearer ivith a con- 
viction that there was something in him even finer than his 
words; that the man ivas infinitely greater than the orator" 
That is the peculiar keynote of Chatham's power 
of speech. It had great defects. He was called a 
tragedian, and no doubt he was a consummate actor. 
A wit declared that he was "the Cicero and the 
Eoscius of his age in one." His enemy, Horace Walpole, 
said that he was equal to Garrick. Macaulay says 
that " on the stage he would have been the finest 
Brutus or Coriolanus ever seen." He knew the in- 
stantaneous effect upon such an audience of real 
dramatic passion. And Chatham let his passion boil 
over. He was no subtle debater, artful to follow out 
an argument in all its reasoning and refute it step by 
step. But he would crush an opponent with a fierce 
retort, a burning sarcasm, or a thrilling appeal. His 
style was at times florid, forced, hyperbolic : but even 
then it was no piece of studied rhetoric; it was the 
turgid inspiration of the moment. It has been well 



20 CHATHAM [chap. 

said : " He was the slave of his own speech " — " no 
English orator was ever so much feared." 

Of the effect of his oratory we have unimpeachable 
evidence. Walpole tells how " he crushed " Lyttelton, 
" crucified " Murray, " lashed n Granville, " punished " 
Newcastle, " attacked " Fox. Lord Chesterfield, a keen 
and sardonic judge, relates that " his invectives were 
terrible, and uttered with such energy of diction, 
and such dignity of action and countenance, that he 
intimidated those who were the most willing and the 
best able to encounter him. Their arms fell out of 
their hands, and they shrunk under the ascendant 
which his genius gained over theirs." Lord Walde- 
grave said, " He has an eye as significant as his words." 
Wilkes, whom Chatham despised and rebuffed, wrote 
of him: "He was born an orator, and from nature 
possessed every outward requisite to bespeak respect, 
and even awe. A manly figure, with the eagle eye of 
the famous Conde, fixed your attention, and almost 
commanded reverence the moment he appeared, and the 
keen lightning of his eye spoke the high respect of his 
soul, before his lips had pronounced a syllable. There 
was a kind of fascination in his look when he eyed any 
one askance. Nothing could withstand the force of that 
contagion. The fluent Murray has faltered, and even 
Fox shrank back appalled from an adversary 6 fraught 
with fire unquenchable/ if I may borrow the expres- 
sion of our great Milton." 

As hardly a single adequate specimen of Chatham's 
oratory has been fully reported, and even as we read 
the bald reports that survive, we have no means of 
calling up the tones, the gestures, and the look which 



ii.] EARLY LIFE 21 

filled them with living fire, we must accept the con- 
current witness of those who heard him, as to the 
direct power of his. words. Mr. Goldwin Smith has 
finely said, "only a few flakes of his fiery oratory 
remain." The Memoirs abound in stories of the abject 
silence in which the House would submit to Pitt's 
mandates, in anecdotes of his opponents cowering 
under his invectives. We who read the speeches of a 
public man by our fireside, or catch some distant 
echoes of his voice in a crowded hall, are ready to 
smile at the tale of members of Parliament cowering 
before a minister, as if they were boys in the lower 
school before the inexorable Dr. Keate. But we may 
remember that in the first half of the eighteenth 
century the House of Commons was a close corpora- 
tion of gentlemen who were believed to be still under 
the spell of noble deportment and full of respect for 
the lofty bearing of the vieille cour of Kensington and 
Versailles. 

An age which values itself on being nothing if not 
practical, commonplace, free-and-easy, and sceptical, is 
wont to sneer at the value of eloquence, and to despise 
it as a literary artifice. But eloquence is of two kinds. 
There is the verbose advocacy of Cicero before the 
Praetor ; there is the heroic appeal of Demosthenes to 
his fellow-citizens. The first is literature ; the second 
is statesmanship. How does a statesman achieve his 
ends, unless it be by using words which convince 
others and fill them with his own convictions and 
spirit ? Speeches may be rhetorical displays ; they 
may also be the trumpet of battle, the springs of 
action, the determining cause of great policies and far- 



22 CHATHAM [chap. 

reaching deeds. The speeches of Mirabeau, Danton, 
of Washington, of Patrick Henry, or Charles Fox, were 
not rhetorical exercises ; they were strokes of state- 
craft and calls to action. So in the main were those of 
Chatham. 

All contemporary evidence bears out the decisive 
judgment of Charles Butler that, quite apart from his 
eloquence, there was in the speeches of Chatham that 
which made men feel there was " something in him 
finer than his words; that the man was infinitely 
greater than the orator." It was not so much the 
rhetoric, it was not even the intellect, which conquered 
and dominated his hearers. It was the moral power, 
the man himself. Frederick of Prussia said, " England 
has brought forth a man." The Duke of Cumberland, 
the King's brother, said " that is a man." "His great- 
ness will bear to have his blemishes fairly delivered," 
said Horace Walpole. He was, said the critical Lord 
Chesterfield, "what the world calls <a great man. ? " 
Of no orator in ancient or in modern times have we 
more definite testimony of the direct power of his 
personality over those who heard him. In the words 
of a contemporary : " Those who have been witnesses 
to the wonders of his eloquence — who have listened to 
the music of his voice, or trembled at its majesty — 
who have seen the persuasive gracefulness of his 
action, or have felt its force ; those who have caught 
the flame of eloquence from his eye — who have 
rejoiced at the glories of his countenance, or shrunk 
from his frowns, — will remember the resistless power 
with which he impressed conviction." 

Of modern historians Carlyle, with all the hyper- 
bolic fanaticism of his creed; has best expressed this 



ii.] EARLY LIFE 23 

sense of power in the man, of the conviction impressed 
by his words on those who heard him speak. Pitt's 
speeches, he writes, "are not Parliamentary Eloquences, 
but things which with his whole soul he means, and is 
intent to doP " Pitt, though nobly eloquent, is a Man 
of Action, not of Speech ; an authentically Eoyal kind 
of Man. And if there were a Plutarch in these times, 
with a good deal of leisure on his hands, he might 
run a Parallel between Friedrich and Chatham. Two 
radiant Kings ; very shining men of Action both." 
Pitt's speeches, the historian of Frederick concludes, 
" are full of genius in the vocal kind, far beyond any 
Speeches delivered in Parliament : serious always, and 
the very truth, such as he has it ; but going into many 
dialects and modes ; full of airy flashings, twinkles 
and coruscations. A singularly radiant man." 

Many years had to pass before the orator became 
master of the State. But, from the first, Pitt's 
speeches in Parliament were rather actions than 
orations. It was not parliamentary eloquence, such 
as was that of his son, of his son's rivals, of Fox, or 
Sheridan, or Burke. From the first, the words of 
William Pitt were the strokes of a man of action, of 
the fighting man, of the leader of men, of the states- 
man. We need no longer regret that the words have 
not been recorded. It was the man, not his words, 
which mastered the nation. The genius of the man 
was expressed in acts, in results, which reacted upon 
Europe, on the East and the West. It is the career of 
the statesman, not of the orator, that we have now 
to follow. It is Pitt, the creator of the Empire : 
Chatham, the one man who might have saved it from 
humiliation and disruption. 



CHAPTEE III 

THE RISING ORATOR 

The young orator, who had won the ear of the House 
of Commons and incurred the ill-will of King and 
Ministers by his maiden speech, steadily advanced in 
reputation both in Parliament and in the press. His 
dismissal from the Cornetcy gained him fresh favour 
from the Prince of Wales and from Lord Cobham, 
and it caused excitement amongst officers of the army, 
who saw how deep official resentment could descend. 
Early in the following year, 1737, Pulteney, the Oppo- 
sition leader, moved for the settlement of £100,000 
a year on the Prince, a project which Walpole and 
George resisted almost as if it were an act of treason. 
Again Pitt supported the motion with all his force in 
a speech which was said to be masterly, and which 
certainly caused intense irritation in the Court. The 
organ of the Government attacked him " as a young 
man of overbearing disposition," and with course gibes 
told him that, though his neck was long and his body 
lean, he must not therefore fancy himself a "new 
Tully." Thereupon the Opposition organ compared 
him to Demosthenes in his youth. Lyttelton in 
clumsy verse hailed his friend as destined to " lead the 

24 



chap, in.] THE RISING ORATOR 25 

patriot band." The poet Thomson hymned praises to 
the " pathetic eloquence n that moulds " the attentive 
Senate " and " shakes Corruption on her venal throne." 
Another bard found in him " a Boman's virtue with a 
courtier's ease." Lord Cobham told a friend that in a 
short quarter of an hour Pitt " can persuade any man 
of anything." After a fierce debate, the settlement on 
the Prince was lost by a small majority. The King 
drove his son from St. James's Palace. The Prince 
retaliated by making Pitt groom of the bed-chamber, 
and Pitt's cousin, Lyttelton, his private secretary. 

The question which raised Pitt from the level of a 
brilliant orator to that of a political power was the 
great issue which absorbed the whole of his career and 
justifies his claim to creative statesmanship. It was 
at bottom the formation of a transatlantic dominion : 
the problem as to whether the North American sea- 
board and commerce should be under British or 
Spanish and French control. The international ques- 
tions were complex and inveterate, the rights were 
disputed, and the facts were uncertain. Nor is this 
the place to unravel that tangled business. By ancient 
treaties, confirmed at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, 
the trade of England and of Spain with the Atlantic 
colonies was limited and regulated. Spain possessed 
vast territories in Central America, together with the 
West Indies, and Florida. She asserted a strict 
monopoly of commerce with her own colonies, to be 
secured by the right of search and of seizing contra- 
band goods even on the high seas. She had cross- 
claims against the South Sea Company for the supply 
of negro slaves to her colonies, and had conceded to 



26 CHATHAM [chap. 

Englishmen the privilege of sending one ship yearly 
to trade in her ports. 

All through Walpole's time the trade of England 
had been growing by leaps and bounds. She had 
thriven under a policy of peace, whilst the European 
powers were intriguing and fighting. Along with 
trade, her settlements in America had been greatly 
enlarged. And ever since the victory of La Hogue in 
1692, when the French fleet had been annihilated, she 
had made good her predominance at sea. In spite of 
treaties, an immense illicit trade with the Spanish 
colonies had been developed. Contraband had become 
a system. The one ship was simply the blind for a 
whole fleet of attendant merchantmen. Eor a time 
it suited the Spanish Government to submit to the 
British system of smuggling ; but at last very violent 
and savage reprisals were made by the Spanish coast- 
guard. These again were bitterly resented and grossly 
exaggerated, so that the whole country, the City and 
exchanges, the navy, the press, and Parliament were 
filled with incessant stories of outrages, insults, and 
spoliations, of which some were fictions, some were 
exaggeration, and some were undoubtedly true. True 
or false, the nation from end to end was quivering 
with wrath and humiliation. The American historian 
of Sea-Power has said : " Walpole was now face to face 
with one of those irrepressible conflicts between nations 
and races to which compromise and repression can only 
be employed for a short time. War arose out of the 
uncontrollable impulse of the English people to extend 
their trade and colonial interests. " 

There were causes much deeper and more solid. 



in.] THE RISING ORATOR 27 

When at last the union of France and Spain under 
Bourbon princes had become a working reality — that 
union against which William in. and Marlborough had 
fought so long — a secret treaty was made between 
France and Spain, the Family Compact of 1733, an 
essential aim of which was an alliance of the two 
powers to destroy the maritime ascendency of England, 
and to cripple her transmarine possessions. The 
treaty itself was not known, but its effects were soon 
seen, and its existence was suspected. A long series 
of disputes between England and Spain gathered up : 
— outrages an British merchants, the boundaries of 
Florida with Georgia and Carolina, the debts of the 
South Sea Company, Gibraltar, Minorca, and cross- 
claims of many kinds. The right of search is always 
odious, and a source of irritation when temporarily 
exercised in war. A permanent right of search apart 
from a state of war, rigorously exercised against peace- 
ful commerce on the high seas, could not long be 
endured by a great trading nation, especially by a 
nation which claimed to be predominant at sea. It 
was idle to appeal to the clauses of treaties twenty- 
five years old, which had long been suffered to lie 
dormant. The King, the merchants, the people, the 
seamen, were all eager to end the quarrel by war. 

Walpole, still resolute to maintain his policy of 
peace and industrial development, resisted the clamour 
with his usual energy and skill. Deserted or betrayed 
by his own colleagues, and deprived of the help of the 
Queen, he still kept his majority in Parliament, whilst 
he met the storm of opposition by masterly sagacity, 
firmness, and diplomatic genius, till, in spite of his own 



28 CHATHAM [chap. 

judgment, and by a gross sacrifice of principle, lie was 
at last forced into declaring war with Spain himself. 
There can be no doubt that, under the letter of 
treaties, the gravamen of the Spanish claim, the right 
in peace to search merchant ships on the high seas 
and confiscate their cargo at will, was technically to 
be justified. In truth, it cannot now be doubted that, 
on a balance of Spanish illegalities with British, the 
burden lay on our country. Nor was it long concealed 
that much of the outcry was extravagant and artificial. 
But a question far wider and deeper lay behind. The 
real issue was this. Was England to have the pre- 
dominant share in settling the American continent and 
in developing the trade of the New World ? 

It is plain that the war with Spain could not be 
justified on moral grounds, hardly by any view of 
international law. But we can now see that it was 
inevitable, and we can fairly decide what have been 
the practical results of the war of 1739 and of the 
succeeding wars of George n.'s reign. The conquest 
of England by William i., the conquest of Wales 
by Edward i., the trial and execution of Charles I., 
and the Revolution of 1689, like the seizure of Silesia 
by Frederick n., had great and permanent results, but 
they cannot be judged by abstract or legal tests. 
Had Walpole's policy of peace and industry succeeded 
in stifling the indignation of the nation, had it been 
consistently carried out by him and by his successors 
during the reign of the Georges, the nineteenth 
century would certainly have found the larger part 
of the transatlantic colonies Erench and Spanish : the 
dominion and trade of the seas not very unequally 



in.] THE RISING ORATOR 29 

shared by the great European powers : and England 
conceivably in the position of a greater Holland. 
Some believe that this result would not have been 
injurious to the progress of general civilisation. 
There can be no doubt whose brain and will it was 
that contrived and effected a very different issue. 

As a device for calming the growing irritation at 
home, Walpole made a convention with Spain whereby 
the questions at issue as to trade, as to the limits of 
Florida and Carolina, and the minor issues, should be 
settled by a Conference; that Spain would pay an 
indemnity of £95,000, and even this sum was reduced 
by a Spanish counter-claim at the last moment to 
£27,000. The announcement of this Convention 
roused a perfect fury in the nation. They had to 
pay a heavy sum for what the public had regarded as 
a glorious victory ; the claims to indemnity for outrage 
and spoliation, trifling as they were, had to be set off 
against the debts of a trading company on the slave 
traffic ; the limits of Georgia were left undefined ; 
above all, the right of search was entirely omitted, for 
the finesse of Walpole had made the fatal blunder of 
dropping out of sight the real issue at stake. 

It was on the 8th of March 1739 that the House of 
Commons met for the grand attack on this feeble 
expedient to delay the inevitable war. Such was the 
excitement that 400 members took their seats at 
eight o'clock in the morning. The Minister's brother 
moved a somewhat fulsome address of congratulation 
on " the final determination " of the disputed claims, 
on obtaining " speedy payment " for losses, with reli- 
ance that the King would protect his subjects from 



30 CHATHAM [chap. 

search, on the open seas, and would settle the limits of 
his American dominions. This was what the nation 
demanded, but the Convention did nothing of the 
kind. Amidst the torrents of indignant eloquence 
poured out by the Opposition, that of Pitt is the most 
famous. The substance is this : — 

" We have here the soft name of a humble address to the 
Throne, and for no other end than to lead to an approbation 
of the Convention. Is this cursory disquisition of matter of 
such variety and extent all we owe to ourselves and to our 
country? When trade is at stake, it is your last entrenchment ; 
youmust defend it or perish. . . . Here we are taking sanctuary 
in the Royal name, instead of meeting openly and standing 
fairly the direct judgment and sentence of Parliament upon 
the several articles of this Convention. 

" You are moved to vote a humble address of thanks to his 
Majesty for a measure which is odious throughout the king- 
dom. They try a little to defend it on its own merits ; if 
that is not tenable, they throw out general terrors — the House 
of Bourbon is united, who knows the consequence of a war ? 
Sir, Spain knows the consequence of a war in America ; who- 
ever gains, it must prove fatal to her ; she knows it and must 
avoid it ; but she knows that England dares not make it. If 
this union be formidable, are we to delay only till it becomes 
more formidable, by being carried further into execution and 
by being more strongly cemented ? But be what it will, is this 
any longer a nation ? Is this any longer an English Parlia- 
ment, if, with more ships in your harbours than in all the 
navies of Europe, with above two millions of people in your 
American colonies, you will bear to hear of the expediency of 
receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable 
Convention? It carries fallacy or downright subjection in 
almost every line. 

" As to the great national objection, Sir, the searching of 
your ships, it stands merely in the preamble of the Convention, 
but it stands there as the reproach of the whole, as the 
strongest evidence of the fatal submission that follows. On 



in.] THE RISING ORATOR 31 

the part of Spain, an usurpation, an inhuman tyranny, claimed 
and exercised over the American seas. On the part of England, 
that which is an undoubted right by treaties, and from God 
and nature declared and asserted in Parliament, is referred to 
plenipotentiaries, to be discussed, limited, and sacrificed. 

" The Court of Spain has plainly told you that you shall 
navigate by a fixed line to and from your plantation and in 
America ; if you draw near to her coast (and this is an un- 
avoidable necessity) you shall be seized and confiscated. If 
upon these terms only she has consented to refer disputes, 
what becomes of the security which we are flattered to expect? 
I will take the words of Sir William Temple : — It is vain to 
negotiate and to make treaties if there is not dignity and vigour 
enough to enforce their observance. Under the misconstruction 
of these very treaties, this intolerable grievance has arisen. 
It has been growing upon you, treaty after treaty, through 
twenty years of negotiation. Spain seems to say, We will 
treat with you, but we will search and take your ships ; we 
will sign a Convention, but we will keep your subjects prison- 
ers in Old Spain ; the West Indies are remote ; Europe shall 
witness in what manner we use you. 

" The right claimed by Spain to search our ships is one thing, 
and the excesses admitted to have been committed under this 
pretended right, is another. Giving an indemnity for excesses 
is no cession of the claim to search. The payment of the sum 
stipulated (seven and twenty thousand pounds, and that, too, 
subject to a drawback) is evidently a fallacious nominal pay- 
ment only. I will not attempt to enter into the detail of a 
dark, confused, and scarcely intelligible account. Can any 
verbal distinctions, any evasions whatever, explain away this 
public infamy ? To whom would we disguise it ? To ourselves 
and to the nation ? I wish we could hide it from the eyes of 
every court in Europe. They see that Spain has talked to you 
in the language of a master. 

" This Convention, Sir, I hold from my soul to be nothing but 
a stipulation for national ignominy ; an illusory expedient, to 
baffle the resentment of the nation. A truce without a sus- 
pension of hostilities on the part of Spain, but with a real 
suspension on the part of England. As to Georgia, it is a 



32 CHATHAM [chap. 

suspension of the first law of nature, self-preservation and 
self-defence. It is a surrender of the rights and trade of 
England to the mercy of plenipotentiaries. The complaints of 
your despairing merchants and the voice of England have 
condemned it. Be the guilt of it upon the head of the adviser. 
God forbid that this House should share the guilt by approv- 
ing it." 

These thunderous invectives, the essential points in 
which were real and true, shook the House and excited 
the nation. The Minister fought on with his back 
to the wall ; his skill and his prestige secured him 
still a narrow majority. But within a few months 
he was driven into a war reluctantly undertaken and 
feebly conducted. We may wonder to-day that a 
statesman of the experience and sagacity of Walpole 
should imagine that diplomatic verbiage could stem 
the torrent of such passion and such pride. Sound 
sense, consummate adroitness, elaborate dispatches, 
are not the last words in the ruling of states : nor are 
peace and plenty the sole life-blood in the organism 
of nations. 

The war was ill-managed, and the Opposition called 
for an inquiry into the orders given to the Admiral. 
Pitt again thundered in support of this investigation 
(October 1740) : — 

" Our time cannot be more usefully employed, during a war, 
than in examining how it has been conducted, and settling the 
degrees of confidence that may be reposed in those to whose 
care are entrusted our reputations, our fortunes, and our lives. 

" There is not any inquiry, Sir, of more importance than 
this ; it is not a question about an uncertain privilege, or a 
law which, if found inconvenient, may hereafter be repealed. 
We are now to examine whether it is probable that we shall 



in.] THE EISING ORATOR 33 

preserve our commerce and our independence, or whether we 
are sinking into subjection to a foreign power. 

" But this inquiry, Sir, will produce no great information, if 
those whose conduct is examined are allowed to select the 
evidence ; for what accounts will they exhibit but such as have 
often already been laid before us, and such as they now offer 
without concern ? Accounts, obscure and fallacious, imperfect 
and confused ; from which nothing can be learned, and which 
can never entitle the Minister to praise, though they may 
screen him from punishment." 

Such was the language used by the "Great Com- 
moner " to a government which was seeking to hood- 
wink the nation and to burke inquiry. Such was the 
responsibility of ministers in a war as understood by 
one who was soon to "organise victory" himself. 
William Pitt was certainly not too ready to be satisfied 
with the assurances " of the right honourable gentle- 
man/' nor was he in the least afraid of being accused 
of want of patriotism, if he presumed to attack the 
government during the course of a war. 

At this time, it must be admitted, Pitt allowed 
himself a violence, we may even say a fury, which 
would shock our more decorous days. In 1741, a Bill 
was brought in " for the encouragement and increase 
of seamen, and for the better and speedier manning of 
his Majesty's fleet." In fact, it authorised search- 
warrants to arrest seamen even in private houses, by 
day or by night, and to press them into the service. 
Although Pitt was a warm friend of the navy and a 
supporter of the war, he could not stand this. He 
said : — 

" Will this increase your number of seamen? or will it make 
those you have more willing to serve you ? Can you expect 

D 



34 CHATHAM [chap. 

that any man will make himself a slave if he can avoid it ? 
Can you expect that any man will breed up his child to be a 
slave? Can you expect that seamen will venture their lives 
or their limbs for a country that has made them slaves ? or can 
you expect that any seaman will stay in the country, if he 
can by any means make his escape ? If you pass this law, Sir, 
you must do with your seamen as they do with their galley- 
slaves in France — you must chain them to their ships, or 
chain them in couples when they are ashore. . . . For God's 
sake, Sir, let us not put our seamen into such a condition as 
must make them worse than the cowardly slaves of France or 
Spain. 

" I say, and I do not exaggerate, we are laying a trap for 
the lives of all the men of spirit in the nation. Would any 
of you, Gentlemen, allow this law to be executed in its full 
extent ? If, at midnight, a petty constable with a press-gang 
should come thundering at the gates of your house in the 
country and should tell you he had a warrant to search your 
house for seamen, would you, at that time of night, allow your 
gates to be opened ? I protest, I would not. Would any of 
you patiently submit to such an indignity ? W r ould you not 
fire upon him, if he attempted to break open your gates? I 
declare I would, let the consequences be never so fatal ; and 
if you happened to be in the bad graces of a Minister, the con- 
sequence would be, your being either killed in the fray, or 
hanged for killing the constable or some of his gang." 

This specimen may serve to show the passion that 
Pitt imparted into debate. He was no braggart, nor 
was he thought to be mouthing. He always spoke 
without preparation, and gave full rein to the tempest 
of his feeling at the moment. At the time, he no 
doubt fully believed himself willing to shoot the con- 
stable and defend the sanctuary of his home. And we 
may note how his eloquence boiled over with inter- 
rogations. From the days of the Philippics and Quous- 
que tandem, Catilina ? impassioned oratory has ever 
rested more in questions than in bald asseveration. 



in.] THE RISING ORATOR 35 

Other well-known examples of the sharpness of 
Pitt's tongue may be mentioned here. When Walpole's 
brother taunted the orator with his youth (by the way, 
he was thirty-two), the terrible cornet replied — or 
Dr. Johnson put in his mouth, the famous retort : — 

" The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the 
honourable gentleman has with such spirit and decency 
charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny, 
but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those 
whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that 
number who are ignorant in spite of experience." 

The rest is surely rank Johnsonese, as when he 
went on: — 

" The wretch who, after having seen the consequences of a 
thousand errors, continues still to blunder, and whose age has 
only added obstinacy to stupidity, is the object of abhorrence 
or contempt, and deserves not that his grey head should 
secure him from insults. 

" Much more is he to be abhorred, who, as he has advanced 
in age, has receded from virtue, and becomes more wicked 
with less temptation ; who prostitutes himself for money 
which he cannot enjoy, and spends the remains of his life in 
the ruin of his country." 

Alas ! Sir Robert Walpole did not succeed in 
muzzling the terrible cornet. And this is how he met 
the charge of his theatrical gestures : — 

" If any man shall, by charging me with theatrical behaviour, 
imply that I utter any sentiments but my own, I shall treat 
him as a calumniator and a villain ; nor shall any protection 
shelter him from the treatment which he deserves. I shall on 
such an occasion, without scruple, trample upon all those forms 
with which wealth and dignity entrench themselves, nor shall 
anything but age restrain my resentment ; age, which always 
brings one privilege, that of being insolent and supercilious 
without punishment. 



S 



36 CHATHAM [chap. 

" The heat that offended them is the ardour of conviction, 
and that zeal for the service of my country, which neither 
hope nor fear shall influence me to suppress. I will not sit 
unconcerned while our liberty is invaded, nor look in silence 
upon public robbery. I will, at whatever hazard, repel the 
aggressor, and drag the thief to justice, whoever may pro- 
tect them in their villainy, and whoever may partake of their 
plunder. And if the honourable gentleman " 

Here the orator was interrupted by a call to order, but 
he seems to have silenced and overwhelmed his accuser. 

It is impossible to say how much of this was really 
spoken by Pitt. We may take it that, if most of the 
rhetoric was Johnson's, all the passion was Pitt's. It 
is plain that the Parliament of the Walpoles, of the 
Pelhams, and the Pulteneys was not very tolerant of 
oily evasions, that fine art of modern ministers ; and 
it was perfectly familiar with downright accusation 
and gross personalities. 

The ill success of the war with Spain increased the 
irritation against Walpole, and in February 1740 an 
address was moved to request the King to dismiss his 
minister for ever. The excitement was great. The 
passages and galleries of the House were thronged. 
Five hundred members attended, many of them at 
six o'clock in the morning. Pitt took an active part 
in the great debate. Unfortunately, his speech has 
been reported in sententious and stilted Johnsonese, 
which can give no true idea of what he said. That its 
substance was a searching denunciation of Walpole's 
ministry, and its form a fierce philippic of impetuous 
indignation, is clear enough. 

Pitt said the Treaty of Hanover was now discovered 
to be for the advancement only of the House of 



in.] THE RISING ORATOR 37 

Bourbon — our armies were kept up only to multiply 
dependence and to awe the nation — Spain had been 
courted only to the ruin of our trade — the Convention 
had been an artifice to amuse the people — the Minister 
had alienated us from the Empire, our only friend, and 
thus had endangered the liberties of Europe. Why 
was the Plate fleet spared? Why were our ships 
sacrificed to the worms? Why were our sailors 
poisoned in an unhealthy climate ? Why do the 
Spaniards laugh at our armaments and triumph in our 
calamities ? The lives of Hosier and his forces are 
charged against this man. They were murdered to 
pacify the British and to gratify the French. 

A minister who betrays an army to defeat, who 
impoverishes a nation, who compels our armies to 
perish without a blow in sight of our enemies — a 
minister who has doomed thousands to the grave, 
who has co-operated with foreign powers against his 
country, who has protected its enemies and dis- 
honoured its arms — such an one should lose not only 
his honours, but his life ; at least he should be stripped 
of those riches he has amassed during a long career 
of successful wickedness ; he should be stopped from 
increasing his wealth by multiplying his crimes. 

" But, Sir, no such penalties are now required. We 
do not recommend an Act of Attainder or a Bill of 
Pains and Penalties. We ask only that he be removed 
from that trust which he has so long abused." 

Here at last we can hear the roar of Pitt's wrath 
in the solemn apophthegms of the pseudo-Johnson. 
All this was, no doubt, outrageous violence, but it was 
not empty rhetoric. At the time, Pitt believed all 



38 CHATHAM [chap. 

this, and all the hot spirits in the nation felt the same. 
Walpole's majority carried him through this onslaught. 
But in a few months he was forced to appeal to the 
nation. The issue went against him. On 2nd February 
1742 he quitted the House of Commons. On the 
11th, as Earl of Orford, he resigned office for ever. 

During the election of 1741 Pitt had been again 
returned for Old Sarum. He took a dark view of the 
state of the country. In a private letter to Lord 
Chesterfield he said : " I think the scene abroad a most 
gloomy one. Whether day is ever to break forth 
again, or destruction and darkness is finally to cover 
all — impiaque cetemam meruerunt scecula noctem — must 
soon be determined." "France by her influence and 
her arms means to undo England and all Europe." 
Pitt was perfectly sincere even in his most violent 
moods. And in his most private hours he was ever 
meditating heroics in what our critic used to call " the 
grand manner." It was the man's inborn temperament. 

Walpole's resignation by no means abated the ran- 
cour with which he was pursued, and no one* was more 
bitter than Pitt, who hotly supported the motion for 
a secret inquiry into the acts of the late administra- 
tion during the last twenty years. They are pleased 
to call it rhetoric, he said, but a man who speaks from 
his heart in the cause of his country naturally uses 
vehement expression. When there is a general clamour 
without doors, an inquiry is the only means of satisfy- 
ing the public. We are not pressing for an impeach- 
ment on specific charges. We insist on an inquiry in 
order to see what specific charges have to be made. 
The people will become disaffected to their Sovereign 






in.] THE RISING ORATOR 39 

if they find him obstinately employing a minister who 
oppresses them at home and betrays them abroad. 
They confess that our affairs both at home and abroad 
are at present in the utmost distress. But, say they, 
you must free yourselves from this distress before you 
inquire into the causes of it. If so, a minister who has 
plundered and betrayed his country, has nothing to do but 
to involve it in a dangerous vjar or some other great dis- 
tress, in order to prevent an inquiry into his conduct, just 
as a thief, after plundering a house, sets it on fire that 
he may escape in the confusion. For twenty years we 
have been under one man, and now find ourselves on 
a precipice. He is no longer at the Treasury, but 
he is not removed from Court, nor will his influence be 
withdrawn until he is sent to the Tower. 

In the same strain of violence Pitt denounced the 
government measures as to the South Sea Company, as 
to public credit, as to the Civil List, as to the abortive 
Excise scheme, as to the Sinking Fund, as to the Salt 
duty, and as to " the weakness and wickedness " of 
many other measures of " our late (I fear I must call 
him our present) Prime Minister." When he turned 
to foreign affairs, Pitt was even more violent. He 
said the Treaty of Hanover was the source of the 
danger to which Europe is exposed, for assenting to 
which ministers must have had some secret, perhaps 
some corrupt, motive. They excuse themselves for 
shrinking from war with Spain. But we were at war. 
Spain was carrying on war with our trade during the 
whole of their negotiations. Spain knew that nothing 
could provoke that minister to go to war, or, if any- 
thing did, it would be conducted in a weak and miser- 



40 CHATHAM [chap. 

able manner. He behaved as if the House of Austria 
were our real enemy. Our warlike preparations were 
a mere electioneering device ; they were not intended 
to overawe Spain or France. And then " the infamous 
convention with Spain," which sacrificed our trade and 
free navigation, abandoned Georgia, and reduced the 
indemnity of £500,000 or £600,000 to a paltry £27,000. 
We acquired nothing ; we gave up everything. 

" By these weak, pusillanimous, and wicked measures we are 
become the ridicule of every court in Europe, and have lost 
the confidence of all our ancient allies." " We are upon a 
dangerous precipice, and we cannot get off it whilst our 
councils are influenced by the late Minister who still has access 
to the King's closet. His punishment, be it ever so severe, 
will be but a small atonement of the past. His impunity will 
be the source of many future miseries to Europe as well as to 
his country. Let us not sacrifice our liberties to the preserva- 
tion of one guilty man." 

This thunderous philippic so nearly succeeded that, 
in a division of 486, Walpole only escaped by two 
votes. He was in imminent danger of impeachment. 
But his consummate skill in tactics, his prestige and 
sagacity, the confidence of the King, and divisions 
amongst his enemies saved him from trial, and he 
gradually regained much of his influence and fame. 
A second attempt to obtain an inquiry was made 
shortly afterwards ; and Pitt again was in the front of 
the attack. He began by repeating many of the same 
arguments for investigation, but he added some out- 
rageous suspicions floating about, as that Walpole had 
given Spain and France secret information. What is 
very remarkable in Pitt's attitude was this — that he 
insisted on the existence of public rumour and 



in.] THE RISING ORATOR 41 

popular indignation as an all-sufficient ground for 
parliamentary inquiry. "The general voice of the 
people of England ought always to be a sufficient 
ground." Here was the germ of one of the new 
ideas which Pitt was to infuse into political life. 
"The ill posture of our affairs both abroad and 
at home; the melancholy situation we are in; the 
distresses to which we are now reduced, are sufficient 
cause for an inquiry. The nation lies bleeding, per- 
haps expiring. The balance of power has been fatally 
reduced." There was a suspicion too that public 
money had been applied to corrupt influence in elec- 
tions. Had not posts, pensions, and preferments been 
the bribes offered for votes in Parliament ? Had not 
officers in the army been promoted or cashiered 
according as they supported or opposed any measure 
of the Court ? Whilst a commission remains at the 
absolute will of the Crown, the officers of our army 
will be the slaves of a minister, and will help him to 
make slaves of us all. The orator wound up with 
fierce insinuations about misapplication of the civil 
list in bribing the electors, about the need of a 
general account of past treasury payments, how the 
steward of the nation had built sumptuous palaces 
whilst living beyond his visible income and amassing 
great riches. And when young Horace Walpole spoke 
in defence of his father, Pitt cried out, " He does well 
as the child of his father, but we are the children of 
our country ! " 

In a house of 497, the secret Committee was carried 
by a majority of seven. Pitt himself served on it; 
but nothing resulted from its proceedings. And the 



42 CHATHAM [chap. 

iniquitous attempt to obtain witnesses by offering 
them an indemnity was properly extinguished in the 
House of Lords. Such is a sketch of Pitt's first 
great political achievement — securing the fall of 
Walpole. Furious as was his attack, and savage as 
were the suspicions he chose to make himself respon- 
sible for in Parliament, there was no personal malignity 
in his accusations. He believed them to be well- 
founded: a majority of politicians in the country 
believed them to be well-founded. Some of the 
charges certainly were well-founded. However high 
we may rank the peace policy of Walpole's long 
administration of twenty years, however great his 
services to the growth of prosperity, order, and 
stability in the kingdom, it cannot be denied that 
much of his influence had been cynical and grossly 
corrupt. It was impossible to govern a nation which 
was boiling with irritation, and had just grounds of 
irritation. And at last Walpole committed the un- 
pardonable crime of entering into a war which he 
regarded as a wanton and useless aggression; and, 
what was even worse, remaining to carry it on with 
half a heart and culpable indifference. 

Pitt had acted with unreasoning passion in a kind 
of patriotic delirium ; but his pleasant altercation 
across the floor of the House, first with the elder, and 
then with the younger Horace Walpole, seemed to 
show that he was not actuated by personal malice. 
The story that he was a party to an underhand 
intrigue to screen Walpole upon certain terms has 
been too hastily accepted by Macaulay, who found it 
in a later edition of Coxe's Memoirs. A vague bit of 



in.] THE RISING ORATOR 43 

backstairs gossip repeated five years after date by a 
quarrelsome fribble like Frederick, Prince of Wales, 
to a loose-tongued scandalmonger like the poet 
Glover, is not sufficient guarantee for a story as 
utterly inconsistent with the character of Pitt as it 
is with the circumstances of Walpole. To me, the 
tale is as unintelligible as it is worthless. 

Pitt lived to regret some of the violent things he 
had said, and was quite as bitter towards Walpole's 
successors as he had been towards Walpole himself. 
And the large-hearted and sagacious Orford lived 
long enough to recommend Pitt to Henry Pelham for 
office in his ministry. He wrote to the Prime Minister 
just forming his new government — "Pitt is thought 
able and formidable ; try him or show him." Pitt 
had to wait twelve years more before he was even 
tried. But in the eighteenth century the only adminis- 
trations which stand forth in the history of England 
after that of Walpole, are those of Pitt and then of 
Pitt's son. 



CHAPTEK IV 

THE ASPIRANT FOR OFFICE 

The four years that elapsed from the retirement of 
Walpole until Pitt at last, in his fortieth year, forced 
himself into a minor office, were years of incessant 
intrigue and change, both at home and abroad, of 
European wars, coalitions, and compacts, of dissolving 
parties, alliances, and administrations. Pitt all this 
time fought desperately for his own hand. He was 
in the zenith of his powers, acknowledged as the 
greatest orator in Parliament, conscious, perhaps too 
conscious, of his genius, with a great reputation in the 
country, but with office closed to him by the rooted 
antipathy of the King and his own subordinate place 
in that intensely oligarchic world. Power was the 
monopoly of a set of great and wealthy nobles, who 
had their own clans, their nominees in the Commons, 
and their protectors in the Eoyal Family, itself divided 
into different branches and cliques. The only one 
of the great peers who stood by Pitt was the famous 
Earl of Chesterfield, in some ways the finest intellect 
of them all, but a peer who acted apart and controlled 
no such powerful combinations as did the Russells, the 
Pelhams, the Cavendishes, and the Grenvilles. It was 

44 



chap, iv.] THE ASPIRANT FOR OFFICE 45 

a cruel chance that this able and honest man was 
permanently debarred from office by incurable deafness. 
The rest feared Pitt more than they desired his 
alliance. His proud independence and his passionate 
self-assertion were qualities ill-fitted to succeed in that 
babel of small intrigue, and insidious fawning on the 
Court and the magnates. 

It would serve no purpose to rehearse all the 
kaleidoscopic changes in the politics and the ministries 
of the time. And he would be a daring friend to 
Pitt who attempted to justify all the shifts and in- 
consistencies of his restless activity. As Macaulay 
showed, the gushing Thackeray only made himself 
ridiculous when he painted his hero as " a finished 
example of moral excellence." Pitt could not be 
right, as his eulogist pretends, both when he sought 
to send Walpole to the Tower and also when he 
extolled him, when he denounced the Spanish right 
of search in opposition and when he submitted to it 
as minister, when he attacked Newcastle and when 
he joined him, when he thundered against subsidies 
and when he lavished them on foreign allies beyond 
all other ministers. 

Pitt's career, especially at this time, was full of in- 
congruities. He was above all things an opportunist, as 
we say to-day; and in times of change a real states- 
man must be opportunist, as were Cromwell, William 
of Orange, Henry iv., and Kichelieu. Walpole's fall 
was in part due to his obstinate consistency in grasp- 
ing sole power for twenty years, in governing by 
corruption and intrigue, and in staving off war at 
any sacrifice. In an age of change and confusion, 



46 CHATHAM [chap. 

consistency may become a grave political fault. It 
is a fault with which Chatham certainly cannot be 
charged. He was a man of passionate impulses, 
sudden to condemn, arrogant, proud of his own virtue 
and patriotism. Conscious of his own high aims and 
his great superiority to the men around him, whose 
jealousies and intrigues were crushing him, Pitt made 
not a few blunders, some of which he had the grace 
to acknowledge in his later and cooler moods. But 
with all his outbursts, we may almost say his in- 
coherences, with his fierce ambition, which in so great 
a man was almost a virtue, Pitt remains a man of 
honour, a patriot of a grand nature, who towers 
above his rivals in an age of sycophancy, corruption, 
and treachery, as much in his stormy faults as he 
does in his heroic ideals. 

Walpole's retirement from office, but not from 
influence, did not mean any great change in policy, 
and not very much in men. The brilliant Carteret, 
the vacillating Pulteney, the tricky Newcastle, the 
learned Hardwicke, the corrupt Henry Fox, could not 
control the great party which had been formed by 
the energy and sagacity of Walpole. Chesterfield and 
Pitt were both excluded from the new administration ; 
and Pitt was as loud as ever in opposition. For a 
time Carteret was the leading minister, engaging in 
European wars and entanglements with reckless un- 
wisdom. When he proposed to Parliament to take 
16,000 Hanoverian troops, Pitt broke out. Far from 
attempting to conciliate the King, he sought to wound 
him in his most sensitive place. 



iv.] THE ASPIRANT FOR OFFICE 47 

"Why should we squander public money, he asked, on 
armies which are only intended to make a show to our friends 
whilst they are a scorn to our enemies ? These Hanoverians 
marched into the Low Countries as a place of security, to 
be farthest from the reach of their enemies. In the next 
campaign we shall be asked to hire Hanoverians to eat and 
sleep. They tell us that we are bound by England's signature 
to the Pragmatic Sanction to defend the Queen of Hungary. 
But the Elector of Hanover was equally one of the parties to 
that treaty. Why does he not send his own troops to defend 
the Queen ? And why should we pay his troops for doing that 
which Hanover is bound to do? This great, this mighty 
nation, Sir, is considered only as a province to a despicable 
Electorate. These troops are hired only to drain us of our 
money. Every year shows this absurd, ungrateful, and 
perfidious partiality towards the German interest, yearly 
visits to that delightful country, sums spent to aggrandise 
and enrich it. Let us perform our duty as representatives 
of the people : and if ministers prefer the interests of Hanover, 
Parliament regards only the interests of Great Britain." 

On the fulsome address to the King on his return 
after the battle of Dettingen, December 1743, Pitt 
again thundered against the Hanoverian policy of war 
in defence of the Empress-Queen. 

" From one extreme our administration have run 
to the very verge of another. Our former minister 
[Walpole] betrayed the interests of his country by 
his cowardice ; our present minister [Carteret] would 
sacrifice them to his quixotism. Our former minister 
was for negotiating with all the world; our present 
minister is for fighting with all the world. Our 
former minister was for agreeing to every treaty, 
however dishonourable ; our present minister will give 
ear to none, although the most reasonable that can be 
desired. Both are extravagant. The only difference 



48 CHATHAM [chap. 

is that the wild system of the one must subject the 
nation to much heavier expenditure than ever did 
the pusillanimity of the other." 

The inconsistency of this from one who became 
the greatest of war ministers is more apparent than 
real. Pitt's interest from the first was, and remained 
through life, in the transoceanic empire of Britain, 
and not in European complications. To him the 
wars and combinations between the states of Central 
Europe — wars and combinations so dear to the German 
heart of George n. and to the vapouring ambition of 
Carteret — were sheer waste of English strength and 
wealth. Pitt's ideals were based on British commerce, 
navigation, sea-power. India, the Atlantic- provinces 
from Cape Breton to Florida, the West Indies, were 
the aim of his schemes and hopes. Eor them he 
would fight and tax his people. To waste them and 
their resources on the Elbe, the Rhine, and the 
Danube he ever regarded as a criminal folly. France 
and Spain, from whom he wrested their Indian and 
Atlantic supremacy, were the true enemies. Prussia, 
Austria, or Italy did not concern us. And from 
the point of view of the founder of our transmarine 
empire Pitt was undoubtedly right. 

Pitt went on to complain that we had not pressed 
the Queen of Hungary to come to terms with Frederick 
of Prussia when he seized Silesia. He complained of 
our joining the coalition against Frederick. It was 
done in the interest of Hanover. What should have 
been done was to bring about a reconciliation between 
the Princes of Germany, in order to establish a new 
balance of power. We ought to have embraced the 



iv.] THE ASPIRANT FOR OFFICE 49 

opportunity of peace and have insisted on it, instead 
of urging the Queen to resist Prussia and France, 
when we might have arranged things on the terms of 
Uti possidetis. 

He then fiercely attacked the conduct of the war, 
going so far as to say that the ardour of the British 
troops had been restrained by the cowardice of the 
Hanoverians, that we had left to the enemy after our 
fortunate escape and so-called victory the burial of 
our own dead. And he actually sneered at the 
assumption that the King had been exposed to any 
real danger in battle. Nay, it is reported that in 
his fury Pitt called Carteret "an execrable, a sole 
minister, who had renounced the British nation, and 
seemed to have drunk of the potion described in 
poetic fictions which made men forget their country." 

With all its exaggerations, Pitt's policy in the matter 
was sound. George n. and Carteret were indeed pur- 
suing an aim which was not British, but Hanoverian. 
Walpole himself might have made the speech with a 
cooler judgment, more tolerance, and less violence. 
But Pitt was here in substance the true English 
statesman. 

A few days later Pitt resumed his attack on the 
whole Hanoverian policy. His Majesty, he said, stood 
on the brink of a precipice. It was the duty of 
Parliament to snatch him from that gulf where an 
infamous minister had placed him. The general of 
the English army had not been consulted. The great 
person himself (the King) had been hemmed in by 
German officers, and one English minister. Every 
symptom of some dreadful calamity attends the nation. 



50 CHATHAM [chap. 

Again he said, " It would be happy for this country if 
the sober maxims and well-weighed councils of the 
Dutch government had an influence upon ours, which, 
he insinuated, were under the direction of a desperate 
and rodomontading minister." Mr. Gladstone never 
used such language of Mr. Disraeli in 1879, nor did 
Mr. Morley use such language of Lord Milner in 1899. 

In January 1744 it was again proposed to vote 
£634,344 to send 21,000 men to Flanders to be em- 
ployed in support of Maria Theresa. This Pitt opposed 
with his usual vehemence. He protested against 
continuing to assist the Queen of Hungary in a war 
with France, and especially against sending an army 
to Flanders. The scheme was so absurd that it must 
be a pretext to cover the maintenance of 16,000 
Hanoverians and to add territory to the Electorate. 
We should never assist our allies on the Continent with 
any great number of men — but only with our money and 
our ships. We ought to have at home as few soldiers 
as possible. Soldiers are a danger to liberty. 

How all this was to be reconciled with Pitt's invec- 
tives against Walpole, with his own acts as Prime 
Minister, and those of his son after him, is not self- 
evident. But whatever its inconsistency, Pitt's argu- 
ment was the sound and patriotic policy. It was the 
policy of Walpole at his best. But now, strangely 
enough, the war policy of the King and Carteret was 
being assisted by the fallen minister in secret. Pitt 
was answered by Murray, the solicitor-general, but 
he held his ground with a high spirit, covering the 
Hanoverians with his sarcasms, and winding up with 
the truly Dantonesque trope that "the passing the 



iv.] THE ASPIRANT FOR OFFICE 51 

question will be to erect a triumphal arch to Hanover 
over the military honour and independence of Great 
Britain." 

It was of this famous duel between Pitt and the 
great Lord Mansfield (as Murray became) that James 
Oswald, Adam Smith's honest friend, wrote his well- 
known criticism. " The one spoke like a pleader, and 
could not divest himself of a certain appearance of 
having been employed by others. Pitt spoke like a 
gentleman, like a statesman, who felt what he said, 
and possessed the strongest desire of conveying that 
feeling to others, for their own interest, and that of 
their country. Murray gains your attention by the 
perspicuity of his arguments, and the elegance of his 
diction. Pitt commands your attention and respect by 
the nobleness, the greatness of his sentiments, the 
strength and energy of his expressions, and the cer- 
tainty you are in of his always rising to a greater 
elevation both of thought and style. For this talent 
he possesses beyond any speaker I ever heard, of never 
falling from the beginning to the end of his speech, 
either in thought or expression. ... I think him 
sincerely the most finished character I ever knew." 

That Pitt was no factious place-hunter is sufficiently 
proved by his conduct at the great Jacobite raid. In 
February 1744 it was clear that England was threatened 
with a serious French invasion, in conjunction with a 
rising on behalf of the Stuart Pretender. Pelham 
moved an address to the King to raise such forces by 
sea and land as he might think necessary. Pitt sup- 
ported this new military increase with all the passion 
that he had just poured on the expedition to Flanders. 



52 CHATHAM [chap. 

He did not believe there was any real danger, but lie 
heartily supported the minister in taking all needful 
precautions. In fact, a French force of 7000 actually 
sailed, but they were driven back by the weather at 
sea, and the Pretender had to adjourn his enterprise. 
In March, Louis xv. declared war in earnest. One 
hundred thousand men under Marshal Saxe carried all 
before them in Flanders, and the British and their 
allies were completely overpowered. Public indigna- 
tion drove from office Lord Carteret, who had now 
become Lord Granville, but he still retained the con- 
fidence of the King. 

The Pelhams were now masters of the situation, and 
proceeded to form a broad ministry so as to include 
the Patriots and the Cousinhood of the Temples. But 
all their efforts failed to shake the rooted antipathy 
of the King to Pitt, though he now detached himself 
from the Prince of Wales. He was left out in the 
cold, though Lyttelton and George Grenville were 
admitted. The hostility of the Court only added to 
Pitt's popularity with the public. Sarah, the old 
Duchess of Marlborough, by her will left him the sum 
of £10,000 "upon account of his merit, in the noble 
defence he has made for the support of the laws of 
England, and to prevent the ruin of his country." 
The money was sorely needed by the almost penniless 
patriot, and of course the wits attributed the change 
in his attitude to his accession of fortune. It did 
indeed require no little explanation to justify the 
change, when, in January 1745, Pitt supported the 
government in their demand for 28,000 men to be 
employed in Flanders. 



iv.] THE ASPIRANT FOR OFFICE 53 

He was ill with the gout ; but, in flannels and on 
crutches, he came down to the House and opened a 
grandiloquent oration that, if this were to be the last 
day of his life, he would spend it in the House of 
Commons, for he thought the state of the country 
was even worse than that of his own health. As the 
House listened with patience to this tragic opening 
from a man of thirty-seven, he went on to say how 
greatly the whole situation had been changed by the 
retirement of Lord Carteret-Granville. He inveighed 
against " that fatal influence," multiplying war on war 
in romantic schemes of conquest to benefit Austria, 
but not Great Britain. He rehearsed all the misdeeds 
of Carteret, whom not ten men in all the nation 
would follow. But he had confidence in Mr. Pelham, 
his patriotism and his capacity, and believed him to 
be now pursuing moderate and healing measures. 
"He thought a dawn of salvation to this country 
had broken forth, and was determined to follow it 
as far as it would lead him. . . . Should he find him- 
self deceived, nothing would be left but to act with 
an honest despair." All that needs to be said about 
this memorable conversion is, that Carteret-Granville, 
who knew more about the state of Europe than Pitt, 
or any other Englishman, was essentially reckless, 
visionary, and arrogant, whilst Henry Pelham was 
cautious, practical, and moderate. And the dangers 
to England, which were distant and unreal when 
George n. first began to meddle in the Austrian 
succession, had become very real and very close when 
France had prepared to invade us, when Charles 
Stuart was hovering over Scotland, and a Jacobite 
rising was imminent in England. 



54 CHATHAM [chap. 

During the Scotch rebellion of 1745, which might 
have been serious if the French had landed their force, 
and if the Pretender had possessed real energy and 
skill, Pitt stood firmly by the government, and showed 
ardent loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty. This 
patriot, and favourite of the people, resisted a crude 
proposal for parliamentary reform. "Is it now a 
time/ 5 he said, " to sit contriving bills to guard our 
liberties from corruption, when that very liberty, 
when everything else dear to us, are in danger of 
being wrested from us in arms ? When thieves have 
burst into the mansion, the fool only would plan out 
methods to prevent the fraud of his servants." In 
fact, Pitt had now definitely become a friend to the 
ministry in which the two Pelhams were the pre- 
dominant power. He paid compliments to Henry 
Pelham, and profuse court to the Duke, his brother. 

The Duke of Newcastle had irritated the King by 
pressing on him the appointment of Pitt as secretary 
of war, and George, who had never liked or trusted 
his present ministers, tried a coup de main by recalling 
Granville and Bath, i.e. Carteret and Pulteney. Their 
forty-eight hours' ministry vanished in air before the 
country knew of its existence. The Pelhams returned 
stronger than ever. This time, they insisted on having 
Pitt as their colleague. Others who were his political 
opponents joined in the same advice. Horace Walpole, 
Lord Orford's younger brother, even drew up a me- 
morial to the King to show the importance of making 
Pitt secretary of war. At last the King gave way. He 
insisted that he would not have such a man about 
his person. And Pitt, with unusual humility, pro- 



iv.] THE ASPIRANT FOR OFFICE 55 

tested that he did not seek to enter the royal closet. 
At last, it was the 22nd February 1745, Pitt was 
appointed Paymaster and Treasurer of War in Ire- 
land. On the 6th of February following he was 
appointed Paymaster in England. He was now 
thirty-eight, and had been eleven years in the House 
of Commons. Horace Walpole wrote that he had 
taken the place " by storm/' 

This subordinate office is remarkable chiefly for the 
public proof it gave of Pitt's integrity. The age, it 
has been said, was one in which anything short of 
actual embezzlement of public money was regarded 
as fair in the game of party preferment. No one has 
ever shown whence Walpole derived the enormous 
sums he spent on Houghton. Henry Fox, Pitt's con- 
temporary and rival, notoriously amassed a large 
fortune from office. The practice in the Paymaster's 
Office had long been to retain £100,000 in advance, 
which brought an annual return of several thousand 
pounds to the private purse of the fortunate holder. 
It was considered that so lucrative an appointment 
would console Pitt for his exclusion from the Cabinet. 
He was a poor man, who long lived on the bounty of 
others ; at the same time he was extravagant and 
ostentatious to the point of ridicule. But he utterly 
refused to touch a penny of the interest on this 
£100,000, or anything beyond his legal salary. 

Again, it was usual, when Parliament granted sub- 
sidies to a foreign power, for the Paymaster to receive 
a douceur of one-half per cent, as his perquisite. This 
degrading practice, sanctioned by the most respectable 
of his predecessors, revolted the spirit of Pitt. To 



56 CHATHAM [chap. iv. 

have yielded to it would soon have placed him in 
great wealth. He rigidly refused to avail himself 
of the rule. When a subsidy was voted to the King 
of Sardinia, Pitt declined to retain the usual commis- 
sion. The foreign king, with many expressions of 
admiration, begged to be allowed to offer him the 
amount as a royal present from himself. This Pitt 
firmly and respectfully declined. On no occasion was 
he even suspected of the slightest attempt to benefit 
by his official trust. And his absolute integrity 
throughout his public career is vouched for by his 
enemies and his satirists. Pitt was not the man to 
let his burning zeal for public duty remain under 
a bushel. It greatly enhanced his reputation in the 
nation. But it stands recorded that Chatham was the 
first great statesman to extinguish that curse of 
corruption which had afflicted English politics since 
the Restoration, as William Pitt, the son, was the 
statesman who finally established strict honour in the 
public service. 



CHAPTER V 

EN" SUBORDINATE OFFICE 

The ten years that passed from Pitt's attaining to 
subordinate office until he was at last admitted to 
the Cabinet, formed a time of petty intrigues at home, 
European complications abroad, inglorious war, and 
public discontent. It is the period of Pitt's career 
which is marked by his most glaring inconsistencies, 
wherein it is least possible to acquit him of factious 
manoeuvres and a purely self-interested ambition. He 
thirsted for power, not for money nor for influence, 
but with a gnawing passion to be able to carry out 
his great designs, and to put an end to the sordid 
bungling of his official chiefs. He found the way 
barred to him by the personal antipathy of the King 
and the jealous rivalry of the oligarchic clans. He 
would yield neither to the Court nor to the magnates ; 
he would hold firm to the nation, not to its sovereign ; 
he would stand by his own independence, and never 
sink to be a docile placeman. In this dilemma, he 
struck out right and left at the Ministry he now 
served, or at the Opposition he had now quitted, as 
for the time it seemed to offer a chance for his forcing 
his way to power, for his making the official parties 
fear his attacks, or for convincing the King at last 

57 



58 CHATHAM [chap. 

that he was indispensable. If his conduct was dis- 
honourable, it was the kind of dishonour with which 
all English politicians have been charged, and of which 
few have been entirely guiltless. I shall not attempt 
the task of defending all these manoeuvres. I shall 
state them fairly, not seeking to palliate them, nor 
pretending to judge them from a true standard of 
honour and patriotism. 

It can hardly be gainsaid that Pitt was now resolved 
to throw himself heartily into the party of the 
Pelhams. Henry Pelham was a man of sense and 
character, a mild edition of Walpole, with a timid 
wish to carry on much the same policy. His brother, 
the Duke, was an arch time-server, whose secret pur- 
pose was to gain the favour of the King. In the result 
King George managed to continue the Hanoverian 
policy of subsidies, wars, and European imbroglios. 
And in effect Pitt, who held a minor office without any 
control of general policy, is found to be passionately 
advocating what was practically the very system he 
had so long denounced. His eulogist tries to show 
that, feeling himself powerless to resist, Pitt consented 
to remain silent. But he did not at all remain silent 
or obscure. His eloquence, he being the tool of New- 
castle, who was the tool of the King, carried through 
Parliament the very measures he used to assail. There 
are some excuses for this desertion of all the principles 
on which his great reputation had been based. The 
Jacobite rising, a French war and prospect of invasion, 
had thoroughly roused him to the need of supporting 
the old Whig connection. He had become a warm 
friend to the Hanoverian dynasty, had parted with a 



v.] IN SUBORDINATE OFFICE 59 

factious Prince of Wales, and had attached himself to 
the fighting Duke of Cumberland. The foreign policy 
of Pelhara, in spite of all its subsidies and treaties, was 
a totally different thing from that of Carteret. It was 
much less wanton, and had more purpose and excuse. 
These things may have enabled Pitt to persuade him- 
self that he was acting in good conscience. They are 
not enough to acquit him at the bar of history of time- 
serving and insincerity. 

However subordinate and detached was the office he 
held, he was the greatest living force in debate, and 
the ministry relied on his support. Pelham told his 
brother, the Duke, that Pitt had the dignity of Wynd- 
ham, the wit of Pulteney, the knowledge and judg- 
ment of Walpole. It needed, indeed, a preposterous 
compliment to explain away Pitt's supporting the pay- 
ment of 18,000 Hanoverians in Flanders ; his defend- 
ing the treaties with Spain and Bavaria ; his recanting 
his resistance to the Spanish " right of search." All 
that can be said of this is, that he loudly asserted now 
that he had been entirely wrong. The one thing he 
would not surrender was his resistance to any reduc- 
tion of the fleet. He opposed the government on this 
point, as he constantly did, but he did so with profuse 
protestations of his devotion to the great party to 
which he said he would hold on through life. Here 
again is a mark that all Pitt's inmost hopes and ideals 
lay beyond the narrow seas. He could play fast and 
loose with European politics. He was ever true to his 
pursuit of Sea Power. " The sea is our natural 
element," he had said in his great speech of 1744 
against the expedition to Flanders. 



60 CHATHAM [chap. 

From this time begins the long rivalry between Pitt 
and Henry Fox, such as was renewed between their 
sons half a century later. Both Pitt and Fox were 
straining every nerve to gain power — Fox all wit, 
adroitness, cynicism, and greed; Pitt all passion, 
patriotism, arrogance, and indiscretion. For the mo- 
ment both found it their interest to rally round the 
Pelhams and support the cause of the King. Pitt was 
now an ardent ministerialist — be the measures under 
debate large or small, old or new, liberal or tory. The 
acute and cool Pelham wrote again to Newcastle, " I 
think him (Pitt) the most able and useful man we 
have amongst us; truly honourable and strictly 
honest." Was it a bill to subject half -pay navy 
officers to martial law ? — Pitt supported it ! The " New 
Mutiny Bill" subjected half-pay soldiers to martial 
law. Pitt supported the clause with his usual fury. 
" We must trust to the virtue of the army : without 
this virtue, even should the Lords, the Commons, and 
the people of England entrench themselves behind 
parchment up to the teeth, the sword will find a 
passage to the vitals of the Constitution." It is not 
easy to see where the vitals of the Constitution come 
in. But in the heroic, or what Horace Walpole called 
the Pittic, style, the Bill seemed big with military 
despotism. Pitt was willing to risk this in reliance on 
" the virtue " of our army. He did not remember that 
but a year or two before he had thundered oub that 
" the man who solely depends upon arms for bread, 
can never be a good subject, especially in a free 
country." 

Did the ministers propose a grant of £10,000 to the 



v.] IN SUBORDINATE OFFICE 61 

City of Glasgow to indemnify it from the exactions 
made by the Pretender in 1745, whilst they left 
Carlisle and Derby without compensation ? The 
thunder of Pitt again resounded through the House 
in support of the grant. "I am shocked, Sir, that 
such a question should stand a debate in a British 
House of Commons. Had the rebels succeeded in 
their flagitious attempt, and called a slavish Parlia- 
ment, I should not have wondered to see such a ques- 
tion opposed in a House of Commons assembled by 
their authority." And so forth in a long and passion- 
ate speech, calling all who opposed him Jacobites, 
ending with, "Their ruin must be inevitable, or the 
relief must be granted ! " All this about a grant of 
£10,000 to the corporation of a city, the valuation of 
which is now some five millions sterling. The " march 
to Derby " and the French invasion made a real revo- 
lution in British politics ; but one of its incidental 
effects was to make Pitt the first lieutenant of the 
Pelharns, and for the time even " a King's man." 

When it was moved that no soldier should be pun- 
ished unless by court-martial, Pitt, even in this " free 
country," would not hear of the conduct of the army 
or soldiers' complaints being mentioned in Parliament. 
"We have no business with such matters; those 
are subjects which belong to the King." Did Lord 
Egmont, now "the Prince's man," move for papers 
relating to the demolition of Dunkirk, Pitt defended 
the ministry for refusing them. "It was not only 
impolitic, but dangerous, tending to involve the nation 
in another war with France." The fire-eating and 
terrible cornet of horse now had a conscientious 



62 CHATHAM [chap. 

horror of war such as Walpole might have envied. 
The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was " absolutely neces- 
sary for our very being." 

In January 1751 Pitt made a speech in favour of the 
annual subsidy of £40,000 to the Elector of Bavaria. 
"The treaty with Bavaria was founded in the best 
political wisdom ; it was a wise measure, tending most 
effectually to preserve the balance of power in Ger- 
many, and of course the tranquillity of Europe." 
" The treaty with Spain was a wise and advantageous 
measure." Lord Egmont, an opposition leader, re- 
minded him that this wise treaty made no mention of 
the British resistance to the right of search. Yes! 
said Pitt, he had once been for No Search — " but he 
was a young man then ; he was now ten years older, 
and considered public affairs more coolly " ; and now 
he saw that the claim for No Search could not be 
maintained against Spain. Pitt never, at any time of 
his life, considered things coolly, unless this astounding 
avowal may be considered " cool." Tempora mutantur 
(i.e. administrations) nos et mutamur in Mis. In one 
thing only did Pitt not change his coat to please a 
minister. The government asked for 8000 seamen for 
the year. Motion made for a vote of 10,000. Pitt 
supported the amendment, minister as he was himself, 
and Paymaster. " The fleet," said he in his grandiose 
way, " the fleet is our standing army." Pitt was the 
Captain Mahan of his own age. 

The petty struggle went on now with three princi- 
pal factions — first, the Pelhams together with Pitt ; 
then, the Duke of Bedford's party, with the Duke of 
Cumberland and Pox ; thirdly, the Prince of Wales's 



v.] IN SUBORDINATE OFFICE 63 

set, with Lord Bute, Lord Egmont, and the wrecked 
genius of Lord Bolingbroke — him whom Pitt once 
spoke of as " the late Bolingbroke of impious mem- 
ory." The sudden death of the Prince in March 1751 
caused a new shuffling of the cards. As the young 
George was but twelve, a Eegency Bill became urgent. 
The struggle took place between the partisans of the 
Princess Mother and those of the Duke of Cumber- 
land. Pitt stood by the Princess, Pox stood by the 
Duke ; and a lively oratorical duel resulted, in which 
it would seem that Pitt had the best of it both in 
temper and in eloquence. 

The Prince's death and the Eegency Act so com- 
pletely shattered the opposition that the Pelhams 
contrived to get rid of the Duke of Bedford and his 
followers, and actually made the once fiery and bril- 
liant Carteret-Granville President of the Council. 
Pitt's " execrable minister " was now an extinct vol- 
cano and a drunkard ; and Pitt and he had no diffi- 
culty in remaining peaceful colleagues. For some 
time the Pelham administration led the most tranquil 
existence ever known to Parliament — Henry Pelham, 
timid, moderate, wise ; the Duke, his brother, restless 
in petty manoeuvres ; Pitt, Fox, Murray, all support- 
ing the government for the hour, while each aspired 
to succeed it. In the midst of the calm, Henry 
Pelham, a strong man of sixty, was carried off by a 
sudden attack. 

The wild struggles for place which thereupon 
ensued fill many a lively page in the memoirs and 
correspondence of the time. Pitt was at Bath very 
ill of the gout ; but he wrote to his friend Ly ttelton, 



64 CHATHAM [chap. 

urging him to push his claims to Hardwicke, the 
Chancellor, " whose wisdom, firmness, and authority " 
he extols. He wrote imploringly to Newcastle as the 
"unalterable humble servant to your Grace." The 
overbearing Pitt indeed now prostrated himself before 
all who held the keys to the Cabinet. It was in vain. 
The King was inexorable. All Pitt's passionate advo- 
cacy of the subsidies, all his defence of the Hano- 
verian dynasty, could not wash out the old affronts. 
Pitt might overawe the House of Commons, but he 
had neither party nor clan at his back. Newcastle 
wanted him as a colleague, but he feared him as a 
rival; Lyttelton, from misunderstanding or jealousy, 
served Pitt but ill, and they became bitterly estranged 
when Lyttelton and Grenville were taken and Pitt 
was left outside the Council. 

Pitt was deeply mortified. He wrote to Newcastle 
a letter full of pride and despair. He was manifestly 
excluded from office, he said, by a personal veto. He 
had no wish but to retreat — " Not a retreat of resent- 
ment, but of respect, and of despair of being ever 
accepted to equal terms with others, be his poor 
endeavours what they may." Very few had been the 
honours and advantages of his life. He hopes that 
some retreat neither dishonourable nor disagreeable 
may be opened to him. To Lord Hardwicke he wrote : 
" My Lord, after having set out under suggestions of 
this general hope ten years ago and bearing long a 
load of obloquy for supporting the King's measures, 
and never obtaining in recompense the smallest 
remission of that displeasure I vainly laboured to 
soften, all ardour for public business is really ex- 



v.] IN SUBORDINATE OFFICE 65 

tinguished in my mind, and I am totally deprived of 
all consideration by which alone I could have been of 
any use. The weight of irremovable royal displeasure 
is a load too great to move under : it must crush any 
man ; it has sunk and broke me." Let those who are 
ready to sneer at Pitt's humiliation and to moralise 
over his ambition, think of " whatever records may 
leap to light/' when the private letters of the 
politicians of our own age will ultimately be given 
to the world. 

"lis pitiful reading these letters of Pitt to his 
friends and the ministers all through these months 
of March, April, and May. He was detained at Bath, 
racked with pain, hardly able to stand, to write, or be 
carried about. He was bursting with desire to be 
Secretary of State and to lead the House of Commons, 
to which he justly thought himself entitled. He could 
not move from his invalid chair, and he wrote with 
his lame hand illegible scrawls to George Grenville, to 
Lyttelton, to Lord Temple, urging tactics, a plan to 
force their claims on the Court, on the Chancellor, and 
on the Duke, " to talk modestly, to fish in the troubled 
waters, to act like public men in a dangerous con- 
juncture for our country." In the meantime Lord 
Temple was to rally the Cousinhood, muster their 
friends in Parliament, and make the magnates under- 
stand that they must satisfy their claims or prepare 
for their hostility. It is not very lofty, nor quite in 
the vein of Aristides and Cato. But it is what is 
often done (they say) even to-day, in a ministerial 
crisis. 

The shifty Duke of Newcastle contrived to be 



CHATHAM 



[chap. 



Prime Minister himself, and put in his creature, a dull 
respectability, Sir T. Robinson, to lead the House. 
" He might as well send us his jackboot to lead us/' 
said Pitt. But this manoeuvre cost him the angry oppo- 
sition of Pitt and of Fox, as soon as a new Parliament 
was elected, and even for a time, a sort of coalition of 
Pitt with Fox, in combined opposition. Pitt retained 
his office, as Fox did his ; but neither of them thought 
this any reason for abstaining to attack Sir Thomas, as 
often as they chose. A more useful public service 
was the new Chelsea Pensioners Relief Act, which Pitt 
devised and carried, to protect the poor old soldiers 
from the scandalous extortions to which they were 
exposed. 

Pitt was not long in formally attacking the Duke 
himself. It was one of his most famous outbursts; 
and, by good fortune, we have accounts of it from two 
most competent, though both unfriendly, sources — no 
less than Fox himself and Horace Walpole. In a 
letter to Lord Hartington, Fox says, " It was the finest 
speech that ever Pitt spoke, and, perhaps, the most 
remarkable/' A young member, whose seat was 
attacked for bribery, treated the accusation with 
" buffoonery, which kept the House in a continual 
roar of laughter. Mr. Pitt came down from the 
gallery, and took it up in his highest tone of dignity. 
He was astonished when he heard what had been the 
occasion of their mirth. Was the dignity of the House 
of Commons on so sure foundation, that they might 
venture themselves to shake it? Had it not been 
diminishing for years, till now we were brought to 
the very brink of the precipice where, if ever, a stand 



v.] IN SUBORDINATE OFFICE 67 

must be made? High compliments to the Speaker, 
eloquent exhortation to Whigs of all conditions, to 
defend their attacked and expiring liberty, etc. Un- 
less you will degenerate into a little assembly, serving 
no other purpose than to register the arbitrary decrees 
of one too powerful subject (laying on the words one 
and subject the most remarkable emphasis)." So writes 
Fox. Horace Walpole tells it in almost the same 
words, and adds : " This thunderbolt, thrown in a 
sky so long serene, confounded the audience. Murray 
crouched, silent and terrified/' etc., etc. "It was 
observed," wrote Fox, " that by his first two periods, 
he brought the House to a silence and attention, that 
you might have heard a pin drop." And Fox adds 
that the Duke of Newcastle was in the utmost fidget, 
and that "it spoiled his stomach." But the craven 
minister, thus flouted by his subordinate, dared not 
call for his dismissal. 

Pitt and Fox both continued to pour heavy shot 
into the Duke and his Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
Then Pitt turned on Murray (the future Lord Mans- 
field, and a great Judge). Fox wrote : " I sate next 
Murray; who suffered for an hour." Though the Duke 
dared not dismiss Pitt, he saw that he must detach 
him from Fox. Thereupon a mysterious three-cornered 
game of finesse took place between Newcastle with 
Hardwicke, Fox and the Duke of Cumberland, and 
Pitt by himself. In the end, Newcastle induced Fox 
to leave Pitt, and enter the Cabinet. Pitt's friends 
and eulogists praise his dignity and self-command. 
Fox's friends say the same of him, with cross-accusa- 
tions of the other side. Whatever may be the whole 



68 CHATHAM [chap. 

truth, Pitt considered that he had been left in the 
lurch, and he never forgave Fox, though it is far from 
clear that Fox had played him false, or had ever 
pledged himself to be his friend. Pitt said he would 
not serve under Fox ; but added, they would not 
quarrel. 

Newcastle still tried to pacify Pitt without admitting 
him to the Council. He sent the elder Horace Walpole 
to him: on which Pitt told the Duke flatly that he 
expected cabinet office at the first vacancy. When 
Lord Hardwicke's son, Charles Yorke, went to Pitt 
with protestations from the Duke of friendship and 
confidence, Pitt cut him short, and said friendship and 
confidence there was none between them ; if there ever 
had been, it was at an end. He would take nothing 
as a favour from his Grace. The Duke tried a third 
envoy, the illustrious Chancellor in person. Pitt was 
obdurate. He would have no subsidies, nor give any 
foreign power aid, unless Hanover was attacked owing 
to its sovereign being England's King. One subsidy 
he might consent to support : two would be as bad as 
twenty. He would not accept "a system" of sub- 
sidies. Pitt was still fiercely defying the King and the 
government. He was still Paymaster of the Forces; 
and the Prime Minister did not have the courage to 
call for his resignation. Ministerial joint responsibility 
is said to be lax to-day. It evidently had not begun to 
exist in those times. 

But at last, in November 1755, the cup was full. 
On the address Pitt rose after uninteresting discourses, 
Horace Walpole tells us: "his eloquence, like a torrent 
long obstructed, burst forth with more commanding 



v.] IN SUBORDINATE OFFICE 69 

impetuosity — haughty, defiant, conscious of injury,and 
of supreme abilities." He inveighed against the use of 
the King's sacred name in Parliament. He had long 
seen the dignity of the House dwindling, sinking. He 
asked, must we drain our last vital drop and send it to 
the North Pole ? (A squadron was going to the Baltic.) 
He protested again and again against burdening Eng- 
land with the interests of Hanover. They talk of the 
law of nations, but Nature is the best writer — she will 
teach us to be men, and not truckle to power. "I, 
who travel through a desert, and am overwhelmed 
with mountains of obscurity, cannot catch a gleam to 
direct me to the beauties of these negotiations." And 
then he burst into the famous simile of the Rhone and 
the Saone (which seems to us to-day merely a bit of 
rhetoric, and not at all the true fire of the real 
Pitt). 1 

He continued that " these incoherent, un-British 
measures were adopted in place of our proper force — 
our navy. Were these treaties English measures ? 
were they preventive measures ? were they not 
measures of aggression ? Would they not provoke 
Prussia, and light up a general war? All our mis- 
fortunes were owing to those daring, wicked councils. 
He could imagine the King abroad surrounded by 
affrighted Hanoverians, with no advocate for England 
near him. Within two years his Majesty would not 

1 " I remember that at Lyons I was taken to see the conflux of the 
Rhone and the Saone — the one a gentle, feeble, languid stream, and 
though languid, of no great depth; the other a boisterous and im- 
petuous torrent; but different as they are they meet at last — and 
long may they continue united, to the comfort of each other, and to 
the glory, honour, and security of their nation." 



70 CHATHAM [chap. 

be able to sleep in St. James's for the cries of a bank- 
rupt people." This was too much even for Newcastle. 
Pitt was dismissed from his place. With him too 
went his allies, Legge and George Grenville. 

To some it seemed that Pitt, now a man long past 
middle life, now a third time debarred from power, in 
a hopeless minority, almost friendless, penniless, a con- 
firmed invalid, tortured with gout, and forced to resort 
to long spells of retirement, was finally to be reckoned 
a political ruin. It was not so. Within twelve months 
he was First Minister of King George, and the head 
of the most powerful government of the eighteenth 
century. 

It was in the midst of these public cares that there 
came to Pitt almost the one perfectly unclouded happi- 
ness of his stormy life — his marriage to Lady Hester 
Grenville, the only sister of his friend, Earl Temple. 
It seems to have been a rather sudden engagement, 
followed immediately by marriage, which took place 
on 15th November 1754, a few months after his terrible 
illness at Bath. The only sister of his intimate friends, 
the Grenvilles, the cousin of George Lyttelton and of 
Thomas Pitt's wife, had of course been known to Pitt 
from her childhood. He was himself a bachelor of 
mature age, and he was married on his own forty-sixth 
birthday. Lady Hester lived into the nineteenth 
century, until nearly half a century after this date, 
and she was a young woman at marriage. She seems 
to have possessed grace, virtue, and good sense in 
abundance. Assuredly the marriage proved to be one 
of unalloyed happiness and mutual affection. Nothing 
in Pitt's whole life was a more perfect success. 



v.] IN SUBORDINATE OFFICE 71 

By the fresh, alliance with the wealthy and powerful 
family seated at Stowe, Pitt greatly strengthened his 
political position. His wife brought him every happi- 
ness that a good and able woman could bring to the 
husband she adored. They had two daughters, beside 
three sons, of whom the second was William, the illus- 
trious Prime Minister of George in. There is not a 
cloud or a defect in any aspect of Pitt's private life. 
He was abstemious, affectionate, thoughtful, and gene- 
rous. As Lord Brougham wrote — " To all his family 
he was simple, kindly, and gentle." The archives 
of Stowe have preserved for us the letters which 
Earl Temple received from his sister and her future 
husband. They are couched in the solemn (and to us 
the stilted) style of that age. Lady Hester writes to 
" her dearest brother," with " millions of thanks for 
your love to him, to me." She feels " that pride and 
pleasure in his partiality for me which his infinite 
worth not only justifies, but renders right." Pitt on 
his side tells Lord Temple, " You sent me from Stowe 
the most blessed of men." He tells George Grenville, 
the other brother, that he must " count every moment 
till the world sees me the most honoured and blessed 
of men ! " Yes ! they are what we now regard as 
artificial and cumbrous for love-letters. But their 
meaning is sound, warm, and true in feeling. The 
form was that of the " polite-letter," it is true ; but the 
substance was sincerity, honour, and love. 

The letters of Pitt have always been regarded as 
stiff and awkward. The King said Pitt's letters were 
affected, formal, and pedantic. He was not an adroit 
penman ; and too much has been made of the anecdote 



72 CHATHAM [chap. 

that he asked a young lawyer to correct his mistakes. 
Pitt was not a Horace Walpole, just as Horace Walpole 
was not a Pitt. The genius of the one lay in his pen, that 
of the other in his voice. But in substance the letters 
of Pitt are manly, dignified, wise, and wholesome. If 
one would know what Pitt was as a man, one should 
turn to his familiar letters to his nephew, the son of 
Thomas Pitt, and afterwards the first Lord Camelf ord. 
They were published exactly one hundred years ago 
in a dainty volume by Lord Grenville, George's son, 
who dedicated the collection to William Pitt, then 
Prime Minister, in 1804. The letters begin to "My 
dear Child " at Cambridge in 1751, when Pitt was 
struggling for office, and are continued until 1757, 
when he was first minister and the greatest personage 
in Europe. 

We should call such letters to-day solemn common- 
place, affected erudition; but I confess to a real 
enjoyment in their affectionate interest in a promising 
lad, and in their keen zest for the old classical tags. 
This mature bachelor, the terrible gladiator of Parlia- 
ment, writes long disquisitions on study to his 
brother's clever boy. He corrects his verse transla- 
tion of the Eclogues. He insists on his going through 
the Aeneid from beginning to end. " God bless you, 
my dear child, your most affectionate uncle " — before 
whom, he might have added, Fox and Murray cower. 
" Love the Iliad, and Virgil particularly." " Drink as 
deep as you can of these divine springs — Me impiger 
hausit spumantem pateram" etc. etc. " He should fix 
on the curtains of his bed, and on the walls of his 
chamber, the maxim — Vitanda est improba Siren, 



v.] IN SUBORDINATE OFFICE 73 

Desidia." Bise early, keep regular hours for study. 
Your books should be Euclid, Logic, Experimental 
Philosophy, Locke, Horace, Virgil, Tully, the history 
of England, Burnet, Moliere, Addison — there is no- 
thing about Brunck or Schutzius, or German erudition. 
" If you are not right towards God, you can never be 
so towards man — ingratum qui dixerit, omnia dixit" 
u Remember the essence of religion is, a heart void of 
offence towards God and man ; not subtle speculative 
opinions, but an active vital principle of faith." 

Then follow precepts as to Behaviour — quite as 
sound and less superficial than those addressed by 
Lord Chesterfield to his son. Do not be above such 
trifles as taking manly exercises with grace and 
vigour. Do not give way to idle laughter, risu inepto, 
lies ineptior nulla est. Politeness is " benevolence in 
trifles." "I cannot tell you better how truly and 
tenderly I love you, than by telling you I am most 
solicitously bent on your doing everything that is 
right," etc., etc. Stale truisms enough, in the style of 
Thackeray's Colonel ISTewcome, but written by a man 
racked with gout and hardly able to hold a pen, in the 
midst of his great struggle with the Duke. In May 
1754, after his bitter disappointment, he writes from 
Bath with his lame hand as to a general course of 
English History — Burnet, Bolingbroke, Bacon, Lord 
Clarendon, May, and so forth — all sadly antiquated, 
and not a word about original research in the Becord 
Office or the British Museum — but merely such 
meagre compendiums as nourished the great genius 
who made so much of English history. 

In 1755 he writes from the Pay Office, praising his 



74 CHATHAM [chap. v. 

nephew's remarks, " natural, manly, and sensible/' on 
some West Saxons, and on his declamation on the 
thesis Omne solum forti Patria est — " a maxim that may 
have supported some great and good men in exile, 
Algernon Sidney, Ludlow — but what fatal casuistry 
may lie therein, to such a villain as Bolingbroke." So 
moralises the mature " Boy Patriot," who lived to be 
the Veteran Patriot of the American War, he who has 
ever on his lips the maxim — ingenti patriae perculsus 
amove. 

He continues his affectionate letters, and his scheme 
of reading, after his own marriage and when his 
nephew's academic career was closed. " I ever intend 
learning as the weapon and instrument only of manly, 
honourable, and virtuous action upon the stage of the 
world." Again he writes as to history, mentioning 
Lady Hester and her child, or again, he mentions in a 
characteristic sentence — " Finitimus Oratori Poeta" 
"Substitute Tully and Demosthenes in the place of 
Homer and Virgil; and arm yourself with all the 
variety of manner, copiousness and beauty of diction, 
nobleness and magnificence of ideas of the Roman 
consul, and the close and forcible reasoning, the depth 
and fortitude of mind of the Grecian statesman." 
Even in the intimacy of family life, Pitt's mind ever 
turned to the memory of Demosthenes. These familiar 
letters have not the sparkling wit of Horace Walpole, 
nor the pellucid incisiveness of Chesterfield. They 
are ponderous in form and trite in expression ; but 
they come from a greater nature, and picture to us a 
loftier ideal. 



CHAPTEE VI 



FIRST MINISTRY 



The month of November 1755 found Henry Fox the 
Leader in the House of Commons ; Newcastle, still the 
head of a discredited government in a national crisis, 
full of disasters at sea and on land ; and Pitt, Legge, 
and George Grenville dismissed from their offices, 
having long been in opposition to a chaotic adminis- 
tration. Pitt was now resolved, not simply to be 
admitted to the ministry, but to supersede it. And 
he took care to explain to the nation and to public 
men the policy which he intended to enforce. His 
pecuniary condition was gloomy. Deprived of his 
salary, without hereditary fortune (and he had strictly 
resisted the temptation to make any profit out of his 
official opportunities), married to a lady of title but 
not of wealth, Pitt was unable to maintain a suitable 
position. 

In this emergency, Lord Temple came to the rescue 
with great generosity ; and the correspondence be- 
tween him, his sister, and his brother-in-law is so 
characteristic of the persons concerned and of the 
Grandisonian style of the age, that we may give it in 
their own words. On the very day of Pitt's dismissal 

75 



76 CHATHAM [chap. 

(20th November), Earl Temple writes to Lady Hester 
Pitt: — 

" My dear Lady Hester, — I cannot defer till to-morrow 
morning making a request to you upon the success of which I 
have so entirely set my heart, that I flatter myself you will 
not refuse it me. I must entreat you to make use of all your 
interest with Mr. Pitt to give his brother Temple leave to 
become his debtor for a thousand pounds a year till better 
times. Mr. P. will never have it in his power to confer so 
great an obligation upon, dear Lady Hester, your most truly 
affectionate brother, Temple." 

Lady Hester writes from her bed (her first child, 
the future Lady Stanhope, was hardly a month old) 
in the vein of the * accomplished Miss Byron," to 
assure her dear brother how highly she is his obliged 
and most affectionate sister. Pitt to his credit frankly 
accepted the generous offer. Lord Temple writes to 
his sister that he is infinitely happy : " This proof of 
his kindness and friendship to me is the only remain- 
ing one that he could give me." " How decline, or 
how receive so great a generosity so amiably offered," 
writes Pitt, " to the best and noblest of brothers ? " A 
correspondence which, in spite of formalities and 
compliments, does honour to all three. 

Though now in fierce opposition to his late col- 
leagues, there was nothing really factious in Pitt's 
attitude. He held the situation of the country to be 
desperately bad, the ministers to be incapable, himself 
to be at once inevitable and indispensable; but he 
was willing to support any measures that were needed 
by the country, until he should be called to power. 
Though he still sat in Parliament for what was called 
one of Newcastle's boroughs, he did not consider that 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 77 

any reason for holding his peace. It is indeed to his 
honour that he declined to recognise any allegiance to 
the Duke, who had so long made use of his services 
whilst excluding him from office. 

Accordingly, Pitt supported an amendment to raise 
the seamen for the ensuing year to 50,000. He 
shuddered that our resources for the sea service were 
so narrow. He recalled the fatal reduction of 1751 
to 8000. He would pursue the authors of such 
measures as make the King's Crown totter on his 
head. Never was a noble country so perniciously 
neglected, so undone by the silly pride of one man, 
or the timidity of his colleagues. Broad shame stared 
them in the face. Shame and danger had come to- 
gether. He concluded with a prayer for the King, 
for his posterity, for this poor, forlorn, distressed 
country. 

When the secretary at war moved to add 15,000 
men to the army, Pitt seconded the motion with 
ardour. Our whole force was necessary. It was not 
enough to send two miserable battalions as victims to 
America. He wished to alarm the nation, to make the 
danger reach the ears of his Majesty. He turned from 
the venerable age of the King to his grandson born an 
Englishman. He drew a picture of a French invasion 
of London and the horrors ensuing. How could men 
so guilty face their countrymen ? The decay of the 
country was caused by the little spirit of domination, 
the ambition of being the only figure amongst cyphers 
— [Newcastle (1), Fox (0), Lyttelton (0), etc., etc., 
etc. (0).] He wanted to call the country out of that 
nerveless state, that 20,000 men from France could 



78 CHATHAM [chap. 

shake it. He wished to see that breed revived which 
had carried our glory so high. It needed no Burleigh, 
no Richelieu, to have foreseen all that had happened. 
He did not ask for the punishment of ministers. Our 
calamities no doubt were owing to the weakness of 
their heads, not to their evil intent. 

Before the year (1755) had ended, Pitt moved his 
famous scheme for a militia : — a half-trained terri- 
torial army of 60,000 — with a standing army never 
less than 18,000. They would be exercised on 
Sundays and one other day in the week for 110 days, 
at 6d. per day — with no deductions. The officers to 
have no pay, but to be drawn from the landed gentry 

— four sergeants (from the regular army) to each 
eighty men — the total cost under £300,000. Really 
a clear, practicable, well-thought scheme which Pitt 
ultimately carried out when in power. All through 
the session Pitt constantly attacked Fox and poured 
out scorn on Newcastle, even professing his honour for 
Sir Robert Walpole, whom he respected — after his fall 

— what ! do any laugh ? — was it not more honourable 
to respect a man after his fall, than when he was all- 
powerful ? " Sir Robert/' said Pitt, " thought well of 
me, died in peace with me." " He was a truly English 
Minister, he withstood Hanover, and kept a strict hand 
on the closet." 

When treaties with Russia and Hesse and Prussia 
were submitted to Parliament, Pitt opposed. He 
opposed the grant for the Hanoverian troops. This 
was not an administration, he said. " They shift and 
shuffle the charge from one to another. Says one, 
I am not general. The treasury says, I am not 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 79 

admiral. The admiralty says, I am not minister. 
From such an unaccording assemblage of separate 
and distinct powers with no system, a nullity results. 
One, two, three, four, five lords meet — if they cannot 
agree : — Oh ! we will meet again on Saturday. Oh ! 
but, says one of them, I am to go out of town." Such 
was a cabinet council in 1756. We trust nothing like 
it ever did or could occur in 1904. 

When the country was seething with panic about 
a French invasion and the expected loss of Minorca, 
Pitt thundered again at the feeble and distracted 
ministry. We had provoked before we were able to 
defend, and had neglected defence after the provoca- 
tion. He would not have signed the treaty with 
Prussia for the five great places held by those who 
signed it. If he saw a child (the Duke of Newcastle) 
driving a go-cart on a precipice, with that precious 
freight of an old king and his family, surely he was 
bound to take the reins from his hands. He prayed 
to God that his Majesty might not have Minorca, like 
Calais, written on his heart ! 

Minorca, as we know, was lost. The unlucky Byng 
made a poor fight with the French and sailed away in 
the night, though he had more ships than the enemy. 
Calcutta was stormed by the Nawab of Bengal, and 
the British prisoners were stifled in the Black Hole. 
The French in Canada captured Oswego on Lake 
Ontario, with 1200 prisoners, 130 cannon, stores, 
ammunition, two sloops, and 200 barges. The country 
was in a tempest of indignation, and in fact these 
disasters were all primarily due to ministerial blunder- 
ing and inaction. The child driving the go-cart now 



80 CHATHAM [chap. 

saw the precipice, which at any rate confronted himself. 
He saw that his time was come. Fox deserted him, 
and offered a coalition with Pitt, which was the desire 
of the King. "You mean you will not act with me 
as minister?" asked Fox. "I do," said Pitt. The 
agitation was intense. The King was in alarm, talked 
about Pitt sending him to the Tower. The Duke of 
Devonshire, an honest neutral, was summoned to form 
a ministry, as Dukes of Devonshire both then and now 
usually are summoned in a crisis. Pitt " behaved with 
haughty warmth " ; stated his own terms ; Newcastle 
must be entirely out of it ; Fox also ; he must name 
the places for his own friends ; but, says Walpole, he 
wanted friends for places more than places for friends. 
Pitt found it difficult to place his demands before the 
King, who would not see him. So, for the first time 
in his life, he went to Lady Yarmouth, the King's 
German mistress, with whom Newcastle, Fox, Hard- 
wicke, and the rest were in regular communication. 
The visit was noted as singular, only in that he had 
never been to her before. Popular addresses for a 
new ministry continued to pour in. The City of 
London demanded to have supplies stopped. A wild 
scramble ensued, delightfully and maliciously told by 
Horace Walpole, who quotes Addison's remark on 
Virgil that " Pitt tossed about his dirt with an air of 
majesty" 

At last, after infinite manoeuvring by Fox, Newcastle, 
and minor men, a ministry was formed, nominally 
under the Duke of Devonshire, with Pitt "First 
Minister," as Walpole says ; Lord Temple, at the 
Admiralty ; Mr. Legge, Chancellor of the Exchequer ; 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 81 

and George Grenville, Treasurer of the Navy. What 
with Pitt's haughtiness, and his indifference to any- 
thing but foreign affairs, says Walpole, the Duke 
retained the patronage whilst Pitt had the power. 
But he remained prostrated with gout all the winter. 
He had no accession of new friends but from the 
Tories who hated Fox. And an inveterate paper 
war was opened with unlimited abuse directed at his 
gout and his supposed new friends. In truth, he 
had not now, and never had, any political friend but 
himself. 

Pitt was now in high office, but hardly yet in power. 
His difficulties were extreme, his hold precarious, and 
his enemies unbroken. He had, says Carlyle, all 
England at his back ; but he had the King, the Duke 
of Cumberland, the great magnates against him ; Fox, 
the Duke of Newcastle, and the bulk of the Parliament 
Whigs plotting to ruin him. The old gang, who with 
Newcastle and Fox had formed what Horace Walpole 
called the worst administration in his memory, still 
retained their offices and embarrassed their chief. 

The condition of the country was as bad. After 
half a century of possession, Minorca had been lost 
to the French j a British army had capitulated ; and 
a British fleet had been disgraced. The Seven Years' 
War had begun. France, Austria, Eussia, with Saxony 
and Sweden, were at last united to crush Prussia — 
ninety millions against five. They threatened Hanover, 
the King's German dominion ; for George was now at 
last the ally of Frederick. England was at war with 
France, which threatened to become paramount in the 
whole North American continent. The treaty of Aix- 



82 CHATHAM [chap. 

la-Chapelle, which had restored the island of Cape 
Breton to France, had omitted to define the boundaries 
that separated the peninsula of Nova Scotia from 
Canada proper. For years a bitter and irregular 
struggle had been carried on between the French and 
the British settlers in North America. The British 
colonists were said to number 1,200,000 ; the French 
about 52,000. But the British were unorganised in 
separate colonies, with distinct governments, and had 
very slight help from the mother country ; the French 
had a single rule, competent soldiers from France, and 
a chain of well-placed forts. 

France now boldly asserted her claim to the whole 
valley of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, and to 
the whole valley of the Mississippi and its tributaries. 
She insisted on hemming in the British to the Atlantic 
seaboard, east of the Alleghany Mountains. That is 
to say, that except Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and 
what are now the Eastern States, the whole North 
American continent was to be French; and this, 
though the colonists numbered but one in twenty- 
four of the British. The French had secured the 
support of the principal Indian tribes. The defeat 
and death of Braddock, the capture of British stockades 
and settlements, and the small results of the fleet 
sent out to intercept the reinforcements from France, 
seemed to portend that the British colonies were to 
be hemmed in along the coast. France now blocked 
their extension to the north, to the west, and to the 
south. Had this ambitious vision of French states- 
men ultimately succeeded, the English language would 
not be spoken to-day throughout the vast American 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 83 

continent on any more territory than the strip between 
the sea and the Blue Mountains, little more than three 
hundred miles broad. The issue — one of the most 
momentous in modern history — was determined other- 
wise by the energy and genius of one man. 

It has been well said that for some years the 
biography of Pitt is to be read in the history of the 
world. His influence was felt in Europe, in India, 
in Africa, in America: from the Baltic to the St. 
Lawrence, from the Mediterranean to Bengal — for a 
time even more potent than that of Frederick him- 
self — inasmuch as Pitt controlled the greatest sea- 
power in the world, and thoroughly understood its 
ubiquitous force. If Frederick had been crushed in 
the Seven Years' War, Central Europe would have 
become the prey of Russia, Austria, and France. And 
Frederick well knew what he owed to Pitt. As the 
King of Prussia wrote — " C'etait la meilleure tete de 
l'Angleterre." Had Dupleix been able to extend and 
consolidate the empire he was so near founding in 
Madras, France, and not England, might have become 
the suzerain of Hindustan. If Montcalm had suc- 
ceeded in establishing the French control of the 
St. Lawrence, the Lakes, and the Mississippi valley, 
France, not Britain, would have been the mother 
country of America. How different would the aspect 
of the world be to-day ! In 1755, all these three 
possible results were far from improbable. In 1761, 
they had become utterly impossible. 

The biography of Pitt in these years has to be read 
in the history of the world, a history which it is 
obvious cannot be even sketched in outline in these 



84 CHATHAM [chap. 

pages. All that can be done here is to note the 
occasions wherein is visible the master-hand of the 
British statesman. During the year 1757, Pitt was 
hardly master of his own government. The ejected 
ministers still retained a dominant influence in the 
House. The people were irritated and suffering. 
Every measure he proposed was resisted by the in- 
trigues of his rivals. But he set to work resolutely 
to meet the crisis. As Carlyle insists, Pitt's eye was 
ever on America. He saw the need of sending out 
to Canada something more than the "two miserable 
battalions/' which he had formerly denounced. He 
now adopted an expedient which was a stroke of 
genius, inasmuch as it gave new blood to the British 
army, whilst it pacified and employed the angry 
blood in the Scotch Highlands. Two battalions of 
Highlanders — each one thousand strong — were at 
once enrolled, and the command given to chiefs of 
their own clans. His design was to recover Cape 
Breton and Quebec and drive the French from Canada. 
Stringent orders were sent to the naval and military 
commanders across the Atlantic to make every effort 
to strengthen the army and the fleet. Eight battalions 
were sent to America. Fleets were also ordered to 
the West Indies, to the Mediterranean, and to India. 
Votes for the year 1757 were for £8,355,320: 55,000 
men for the navy; 45,000 for the army. 

One of the first difficulties was the fate of the 
unfortunate Admiral Byng, in which the conduct of 
Pitt must be pronounced to be wise, generous, and 
bold. After Byng's ignominious retreat before the 
French fleet, leaving Minorca to its fate, the rage 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 85 

and shame of the nation had forced Fox and Newcastle 
to order the Admiral home for court-martial. He was 
not tried until six months after his return. The court 
consisted of four admirals and nine captains. By 
the twelfth article of war every seaman who, through 
cowardice, negligence, or disaffection, should not do his 
utmost to take or destroy an enemy's ship with 
which he was engaged shall suffer death. The four 
admirals and the nine captains heard evidence and 
the defence, and then acquitted Byng of cowardice 
and of disaffection ; but they unanimously found him 
guilty of not having done his utmost, and accordingly 
condemned him to be shot. They added a recom- 
mendation to mercy, on the ground that his offence 
was " an error of judgment." 

Thereupon violent agitation arose in the public, 
and debates in Parliament. The King, and apparently 
officers in both services, as well as the general public, 
felt that Byng had brought disgrace upon the navy by 
a fatal act of weakness. Politicians hoped that the 
recommendation to mercy would prevail; but nearly 
all of them hesitated to urge it on the King. Fox, 
who was Leader of the House when Byng was recalled, 
tried to throw the onus on Pitt. Stern disciplinarian 
as he ever was, Pitt affirmed in Parliament that he 
desired mercy to be shown. He went to the King, and 
told him that the House of Commons desired a pardon. 
The King cut him short by saying, " You have taught 
me to look elsewhere than to the Commons for the 
sense of my subjects ! " It was stated in the House 
that Captain Keppel, one of the court, had doubts 
about the sentence. Pitt procured a respite from the 



86 CHATHAM [chap. 

King. He carried a Bill to release the members of the 
court-martial from their oath of secrecy (by 153 
against 23). 1 The Bill went to the House of Lords, 
where each member of the court-martial was sepa- 
rately cross-examined by Lord Hardwicke and Lord 
Mansfield, the greatest living lawyers, who asked each 
officer if he thought the sentence unjust. They all 
answered in the negative. Thereupon the Lords 
threw out the Bill, and left Byng to his fate. He 
was shot on the 14th March 1757, having shown the 
utmost intrepidity and dignity of bearing. 

On this famous incident, so ill-understood even now, 
one may observe : — 

1. That Byng was not executed in haste: he was 
shot nine months after his arrest, and three months 
after his trial, after long debates in both Houses and 
frequent respites. 

2. He was not executed simply from popular 
clamour, for the House of Lords were his worst op- 
ponents ; and two of the greatest lawyers who ever 
sat there, were his severest judges. 

3. The Court, the politicians, and the nation were 
all agreed that Byng had lowered his country's flag, 
and merited severe punishment — degradation, if not 
death. The Article left no alternative but death. 

4. The cooler minds saw that the admiral's offence 

1 It was on the debate of this Bill that Pitt said : " May I fall 
when I refuse pity to such a suit as Mr. Keppel's, justifying a man 
who lies under captivity and the shadow of death ! I thank God I 
feel something more than popularity — I feel justice! " Lord Tem- 
ple, at the head of the Admiralty, had refused to sign the death- 
warrant until its legality was referred to the judges. This was 
done. It was pronounced to be legal. 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 87 

was fatal error of judgment rather than " negligence," 
and they were willing to give him the benefit of the 
doubt. 

5. Pitt and Temple fairly did their best to save his 
life at the risk of facing the anger of the King, the 
contempt of the people, and the intrigues of political 
rivals. 

Pitt now accomplished what was perhaps the most 
conspicuous volte-face in the whole of his many-sided 
career. He who for twenty years had stormed against 
German entanglements and subsidies to foreign sove- 
reigns, he who had won fame as a youth by sneering 
at Hanover and the King, now opened his own ministry 
to George n. by advising an alliance with Frederick of 
Prussia, and by proposing a vote of £200,000 for the 
war. It must be admitted that the change was strong, 
for Pitt had condemned this very treaty with Frederick 
only the year before ; and so far as his policy can be 
said to have regular principle, it was to establish 
British ascendency at sea, and across the ocean, but 
not to meddle in the centre of Europe. The critics 
were ready to sneer. Fox was equal to the occasion 
and to himself, when he reminded Pitt of his famous 
trope that "the German measures would be a mill- 
stone round the neck of the minister," and he could 
but hope this German measure would prove to be an 
ornament round the neck of the present minister. 

This was a very pretty bit of parliamentary satire. 
But the case was now changed ; the men were different ; 
and the purpose was not the same. Pitt cared little 
for rigid consistency, for unchangeable alliances and 



88 CHATHAM [chap. 

eternal enmities. He would not have been a great 
statesman if he did. He saw that he had been wrong 
in opposing the alliance with Frederick, that he had 
not understood the man. He saw it, and he frankly 
admitted it. To prevent Prussia being crushed by the 
gigantic confederacy of five Powers was a very different 
thing from assisting Maria Theresa to regain her ances- 
tral dominions. Lastly, to protect Hanover from being 
absorbed by Prance, because the Elector of Hanover 
was King of England, was a very different thing from 
flinging away English blood and treasure to promote 
the ambition and second the quarrels of the Elector of 
Hanover. Pitt's policy, as he clearly showed, was 
this : — ^ie would not sacrifice British interests for 
Hanoverian objects, but he would not let Hanover 
be sacrificed solely by reason of its connection with 
England. This was a perfectly intelligible policy; 
and it was a sound policy. Pitt's change of front was 
startling ; but it has an adequate defence. 

When Pitt was at last admitted to the closet of his 
ungracious King, he behaved with ostentatious, perhaps 
preposterous, humility; would not be seated in the 
royal presence ; and, when unable to stand for his 
gout, would address his sovereign kneeling on a stool. 
Carlyle will have it that Pitt " had some reverence for 
George." Not for the man, one thinks ; but Pitt, in 
his imaginative and tragedy -king vein, seems to have 
felt the visible presence of his Sacred Majesty as a sort 
of consecration of his own power. His Sacred Majesty, 
at any rate at first, showed small reverence for the 
odious minister who forced himself on his King, and 
grumbled at the debating speeches he was required to 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 89 

listen to from his counsellor. Queen Victoria, it is 
whispered, complained that Mr. Gladstone " talked to 
her as if she were a public meeting." Pitt, we may- 
be sure, talked to George as he had talked to the 
ministry of Walpole or Granville. George said Pitt 
was tedious and pompous, and had never read books 
on International Law. He was " alternately harsh and 
subservient to his sovereign," they said. As to Temple, 
— who was free and easy, treated the King as if he 
were Newcastle or Granville, and dared to say that 
Byng had merely shown the same prudence as George 
had shown at Oudenarde — the King found him un- 
bearable. He said, " Now ministers are king." 

Cumberland, who was to command the army sent to 
Germany, almost stipulated that Pitt should be dis- 
missed before he sailed. Newcastle, who still con- 
trolled a great party in the Commons, and Pox, who 
was thirsting for place, carried on a set of incessant 
intrigues, which fill the Memoirs and make them as 
amusing as any romance. George at last saw an 
opportunity to strike his blow. Temple was sum- 
marily dismissed from the Admiralty. Pitt refused 
to resign. The King sent for his seals and those of 
Mr. Legge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pitt's 
friends in the government followed him and resigned. 

For eleven weeks the game of ministerial combina- 
tions went on with as many surprises and changes as 
any in the Comedy of Errors or the Fourberies de 
Scapin. The public excitement was intense. The 
Stocks fell. The City voted Pitt its freedom in a 
costly casket. The other great towns followed suit. 
Walpole says — " for some weeks it rained gold boxes." 



90 CHATHAM [chap. 

The agitation was almost like that which carried the 
Reform Bill of 1832. Endless combinations of Peers and 
Commoners were tried and torn up in a day/ In the 
meantime Parliament was sitting; a war was being 
waged at sea and land ; there was no government ; the 
King, the Duke of Cumberland, the Prince of Wales and 
his mother — all had their own partisans pulling differ- 
ent ways. In the House, an inquiry was being forced on 
to fix the responsibility for the loss of Minorca and other 
disasters. If Pitt had used all his fire, it is thought he 
might have crushed for ever both Newcastle and Fox. 

The amazing and amusing result of all such serio- 
comedy was this. Instead of crushing Newcastle and 
Fox, who had just driven him from power, instead of 
defying the King, who had rudely dismissed him, Pitt 
became his absolute First Minister, and that in coali- 
tion with Newcastle, with Fox, and even with that 
" execrable minister," Carteret-Granville. The won- 
derful peripeteia has been told by Macaulay with such 
truth and such conciseness, that it is well to borrow 
his account. Pitt, he says, had found by experience 
that he could not stand alone. Without rank, without 
fortune, without borough interest, hated by the King, 
hated by the aristocracy, he was still a person of the 
first importance in the state. He had formed a min- 
istry, had excluded his chief rivals from it — these the 
most powerful Whig Peer and the ablest debater in 
the Commons. 

He now found that he had gone too far. He had 
the people, but no majority in the people's House. 
Newcastle had wealth, rank, parliamentary influence, 
prestige, long practice in intrigue. Fox in oratorical 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 91 

power was only inferior to Pitt, and in adroit debating 
even his superior. The King preferred Newcastle ; 
Cumberland held by Fox; the public clamoured for 
Pitt. Newcastle had been turned out by the public 
indignation. Pitt had been turned out by want of 
parliamentary backing. Newcastle wanted patronage 
more than power. Fox wanted money more than 
power. Pitt wanted nothing but power, and refused 
to share it with Newcastle or with Fox. Newcastle, 
Fox, or Pitt each could turn out the other two. 
Neither could maintain a government alone. United 
they would be irresistible. Pitt, Fox, and Newcastle's 
nominees need fear no opposition in the House. The 
Duke could answer for the army of place-hunters and 
the benevolent neutrality of the magnates. Pitt could 
rouse the cities, the services, and the nation to a white 
heat of enthusiasm. In face of such a coalition, the 
King, the royalties, and the factions could do nothing. 
After infinite negotiations and shuffling of the cards, 
in which Lord Chesterfield, Lord Hardwicke, and 
Lord Mansfield played important parts, and Pitt 
showed firmness and dignity, a combination was 
secured whereby Pitt gained everything he desired. 
He himself became Secretary of State, Leader of the 
House of Commons, and undoubted First Minister. 
The Duke was one of the Commissioners at the Trea- 
sury along with George Grenville, where he could 
continue to job and patronise to his heart's content. 
Fox was kicked downstairs from cabinet rank into the 
Pay Office, where he was content to make a vast for- 
tune by illicit perquisites. Legge returned to the 
Exchequer, and Temple returned as Privy Seal. 



92 CHATHAM [chap. 

Granville, a drunkard and a wreck, remained President 
of the Council. On the face of it, this might seem to 
be the old ministry of Newcastle, Fox, and Pitt. In 
truth it was nothing of the kind. It was a ministry 
in which Pitt was absolute master; the rest were 
ciphers. Newcastle retained jobbery without power 
or dignity. Fox obtained money without power or 
rank. Both were practically degraded. Pitt had 
placed his friends, George Grenville, James Grenville, 
Temple, and Legge, where he wanted them. He had 
the sole control. He now broke with the pocket- 
borough system, having sat during twenty years for 
seats in the gift of his own family or of the Pelhams. 
He now had himself elected for the city of Bath, 
where indeed he had to pass many weary months as 
an invalid. The King was checkmated. Parliament 
became obsequious and silent ; and Pitt, freed from the 
solicitations of obscure place-hunters and the worry of 
a strong opposition, was able to devote his whole soul 
to the nation. This ministry, for now it was really 
Pitt's ministry, in four years won more temporary 
glory and effected more permanent results than any 
English ministry l within the same time. 

Pitt, now in sole control at the helm of state, de- 
voted himself with intense ardour to all the details 
of administration, so far as concerned military and 
naval affairs, and foreign policy. In these he was all 
that Frederick was in Prussia, or Napoleon was as 

1 Lord Waldegrave, who went to Kensington to watch the new 
ministers present themselves to the King, says Pitt and his friends 
were decent and sensible: neither insolent nor awkward. The 
Duke and his party showed such fear and shame that made them 
objects of pity. 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 93 

Emperor. He spared no labour; nothing was too 
small for his attention. His orders were exact, clear, 
peremptory; his dispatches lucid expositions of defi- 
nite policies. The special characteristic of his rule lay- 
in the choice of fit men to lead an expedition, to devise 
a plan of strategy, or to conduct a negotiation. He 
utterly discarded seniority as a ground of promotion. 
He would pick out for service new men, usually young, 
often unknown men. He would trust them with full 
powers, and took personal care to give them resources 
adequate for each task. It was his wonderful power 
of judging men, of measuring the needs of each under- 
taking beforehand, of insisting on rapidity and punc- 
tuality, of following up each blow by another, that 
secured each dazzling results in action. Civilian as he 
was, Pitt filled each man he employed with that pat- 
riotic passion which Frederick, Nelson, and Napoleon 
infused into their officers and men. It was said — No 
one ever left Pitt's cabinet without feeling himself a 
braver man. 

Though he was "constitutional minister" in a 
parliamentary government, Pitt soon became as per- 
emptory and despotic as Frederick or Napoleon him- 
self. Many are the tales of his dictatorial ways. He 
often bearded the King, as when George, in a rage at 
his son's signing the surrender of Kloster-Zeven, cried 
out, " I gave him no orders to treat ! " " No, Sir," 
said Pitt, " but you gave him very full powers ! " The 
story went that when the Duke of Newcastle hesitated 
to sign Treasury orders for army stores, Pitt sent 
word that he would have the Duke impeached. When 
a general complained that he could not obtain the 



94 CHATHAM [chap. 

supplies he needed, Pitt sent round to each Board royal 
commands to have these demands immediately satis- 
fied. Lord Anson had been forced on Pitt as head of 
the Admiralty by the King and Lord Hardwicke, 
Anson's father-in-law. Pitt compelled the Naval Com- 
missioners to countersign his own dispatches, which 
he would not allow them to read. So Lord Temple 
declared, and that he actually sent out fleets with 
sealed orders without suffering the Board of Admiralty, 
which supplied and commissioned them, to know 
whither they were sent. 

From the first Pitt conceived a set of grand schemes. 
He found his country at war with France, and the 
great Coalition of Sovereigns ready to crush Prussia 
and Hanover. He decided to save both ; and, in order 
to create a diversion to the west, he prepared an 
invasion of France in the Bay of Biscay. At the 
same time he arranged to supply Frederick with men 
and money without stint. He sent strong reinforce- 
ments to the East Indies to second the efforts of the 
Company, where the genius of Clive was about to 
found an Empire. The French ports, both on the 
Atlantic and in the Mediterranean, were to be watched 
and blockaded, whilst the French fleets were to be 
driven from the seas. Above all, the French settle- 
ment in Canada was to be annexed, and the British 
dominion secured in the valleys of the St. Lawrence 
and of the Mississippi and Ohio. These mighty results, 
in distant lands and in four different continents, were 
all effected within a few years by one who was neither 
Sovereign nor Conqueror, but a decrepit civilian who 
only left St. James's Square for Hayes or the waters 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 95 

of Bath, who never " set a squadron in the field/ 5 but 
who "organised victory/' as was said of Carnot, by 
his true and far-reaching vision, by insight into human 
capacities, by fiery energy, and by infusing into a 
nation his own heroic soul. 

It must be admitted that the first expeditions on 
the Continent were anything but successful. The 
Duke of Cumberland was defeated in Germany, and 
made a pitiable surrender, which his father repudiated, 
disowning his son with passion. Pitt, whom the Duke 
had striven to degrade, generously stood by the fallen 
commander, and enabled him to escape further punish- 
ment by resigning his office and retiring into civil life. 
He then induced George to appoint Prince Ferdinand 
of Brunswick commander of an army of 30,000 Hano- 
verians, who before long drove the French from the 
Electorate and protected Frederick on that side. This 
at last overcame the ill-will of King George ; for Pitt 
was now himself become " a Hanover-troop minister," 
indeed under quite altered circumstances. " Give me 
your confidence, Sire," said the minister, "and I will 
deserve it." " Deserve my confidence, Sir," said the 
King in turn, "and you shall have it." The King, 
who wanted neither sense nor a rough wit, had the 
best of the altercation. At last he saw that Pitt de- 
served his confidence, and he henceforth steadily gave it. 

The expeditions against the coast of France did 
not effect very much. A very powerful fleet was 
dispatched to Kochefort, with sealed orders to seize 
that fort. A large army was placed on board, and 
great preparations for a landing were made. The 
whole French coast was alarmed, and the nation 



96 CHATHAM [chap. 

astonished. Such secrecy was observed as to the 
objective of attack that Lord Anson, at the head of 
the Admiralty, was not allowed to know their destina- 
tion. He told Pitt that it was impossible to comply 
with his orders for the ships and their equipment. 
Pitt replied that he would have Anson impeached if 
they were not ready at the time ordered. In result, 
the expedition was mismanaged and nothing effective 
was done. A fresh expedition was organised, which 
landed and attacked St. Malo, but with small results. 
A third expedition destroyed the forts at Cherbourg, 
capturing cannon and colours and ammunition. A 
fourth expedition against St. Malo met with a dis- 
astrous repulse, with the loss of a thousand men in 
killed, wounded, and prisoners. 

These repeated expeditions to attack French sea- 
ports have been severely criticised as the weakest parts 
of Pitt's schemes, and even as preposterous follies. 
They were indeed very costly demonstrations. Fox 
said " it was breaking windows with guineas." King 
George said, " You may brag of taking their guns : 
they will brag that they drove you away ! w Lord 
George Sackville refused to command the last expedi- 
tion, and said " He wanted no more buccaneering." 
From Pitt's point of view of defeating the French, 
there is something to be said to the contrary. Of the 
four expeditions, the last only had ended in repulse 
and defeat. The first three had been effected abso- 
lutely without loss in ships or men ; and if they had 
brought no permanent advantage, they had inflicted 
on the enemy humiliation and alarm. Pitt well remem- 
bered the confusion and paralysis caused in England 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 97 

at the panic of a French expedition being about to 
invade our shores. He no doubt counted on the effect 
in France of four actual descents on French soil, and 
the attack and capture of their forts and fortresses. 
He could not expect to retain any footing on the terri- 
tory of France. But he amply secured his main objects 
— to make the Continent feel the ascendency of Britain 
at sea, and to draw off French forces from Germany to 
the defence of their western seaboard. Frederick of 
Prussia and Ferdinand of Brunswick admitted that 
this had been accomplished. Wanton and idle in 
themselves, these costly attacks on the French ports 
must be judged as part of the central scheme of Pitt's 
policy. This now was, to destroy the vast colonial 
settlements in Asia, Africa, and America which France 
had been building up for a generation, and to plant 
on their ruins a still vaster British Empire. And to 
secure this end it was essential to crush the French 
naval power, and to paralyse the naval bases of the 
French fleets. 

Another remarkable scheme of Pitt's, to aid in the 
war on France, was his secret proposal to Spain in 
1757 to cede Gibraltar, which for fifty years had been 
in British possession, on condition of Spain joining the 
war against France, and enabling Britain to recover 
Minorca from the French. Pitt induced the King and 
his cabinet to join in this momentous offer, taking 
great pains with a long dispatch he wrote himself in 
three days to present to the Spanish Court every 
argument which might operate on their minds. The 
Spanish Court declined to entertain the proposal, 
having no taste for a war with France, however great 



98 CHATHAM [chap. 

their eagerness to recover their historic fort. Gibraltar 
accordingly has flown the Union Jack for exactly two 
hundred years, with all the consequences that we 
know. How different many things would have been 
if Spain had listened to Pitt's proposal ! That it should 
have been made by such a man at such a time may 
serve to illustrate the range of his ideas, and the 
ascendency he had now acquired over the King and 
his advisers. 

" The warfare of 1758 was waged through all the 
four quarters of the globe," says Earl Stanhope, in 
the grand manner of his great kinsman himself. 
Wherever France had laid the foundations of Empire, — 
in India, in Africa, in America, — there Pitt, not con- 
tent with bombarding her western ports, and driving 
her armies out of Hanover, continued to assail her by 
a British fleet and constant expeditions. The French 
under Colbert had wrung from the Portuguese and 
the Dutch the valuable colony of Senegal, stretching 
for five hundred miles on the West Coast of Africa from 
Cape Blanco to the Gambia. They held Fort Louis on the 
mouth of the Senegal, and fortified the island of Goree, 
which commanded the Gambia. A Quaker merchant 
having proposed to Pitt an expedition to annex the 
settlement, which this "passive resister," with an eye 
to the main chance, assured him could be effected 
" without bloodshed," he straightway dispatched a 
fleet with about one thousand marines and regular 
troops — in what would now be called "a peaceful 
mission of commerce." The French forces were over- 
powered ; and for some years Senegal remained under 
the British flag. 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 99 

This ministry of Pitt marks also the foundation of 
the British Empire in India, which is usually dated 
from the victory of Plassey in 1757 over the Nabob of 
Bengal and that of Wandewash in 1761 over the 
French Lally. But these events belong to the life of 
Clive or of Sir Eyre Coote, not to that of Chatham ; 
and they need not be recorded here except in outline. 
The record of daring, of fraud, of rapacity, of genius 
and heroism by which that wonderful dominion was 
rapidly achieved come only in an incidental way into 
the career of Chatham. When he first entered into 
power in England, the East India Company were still 
struggling to hold their ground against the French, 
and had merely an insecure foothold in Madras and 
Calcutta. Clive was restoring their fortunes and 
making his own by marvellous feats of audacity, 
vigour, and unscrupulous genius both for policy and 
war. He saved to the Company Madras and the 
Carnatic; he was the real founder of Calcutta; he 
secured Bengal. He struck right and left at the 
French settlements or the Dutch, and made the 
Hoogly a British river. The British then turned 
upon the French settlement, and by the sword of Sir 
Eyre Coote at Wandewash, the defeat of the brave 
Lally Tollendal, and the capture of Pondicherry, 
finally extinguished the prospects of a French empire 
in Hindustan. Those momentous four years from 1757 
to 1761 had changed the whole future of the Indian 
Peninsula. But the home government had no great 
share in the work, beyond supporting the Company 
with able soldiers and a small fleet. It was the star of 
Pitt rather than his genius which made his ministry 



iLtfC. 



100 CHATHAM [chap. 

coincide with the birth of that Raj which has now 
made the King of England Emperor of Hindustan. 
The deeds by which it was founded cannot be set down 
except indirectly to increase his glory or to burden 
his last account at the Judgment-Seat of human 
history. 

Pitt most ardently supported the Company and its 
officers in their struggles, as his zealous temper in 
part inspired their courage. In the famous speech he 
made in the Parliament of December 1757, reported 
only in fragments by Horace Walpole, we are told how 
he " burst out into an Eastern panegyric. There he 
found Watson, Pococke, and Clive : — what astonishing 
success had Watson had with only three ships, which 
had been laid up for some time on land ! He did not 
stay to careen this, and condemn that, but at once 
sailed into the body of the Ganges. He was supported 
by Clive, that man not born for a desk ; that heaven- 
born General, whose magnanimity, resolution, deter- 
mination, and execution would charm a King of 
Prussia, and whose presence of mind astonished the 
Indies ! " We may feel sure that these were not Pitt's 
exact words. But we can see the meaning, and can 
understand how the thrill of them would pass across 
the ocean to Bengal and the Carnatic. 

With the conquest of Canada and the establishment 
of the British name in the valley of the Mississippi it 
was far otherwise. Here the design, the choice of men, 
the preparation of the armaments both by sea and 
land was the work of Pitt, and almost solely his direct 
and personal work. This is the part of his policy 
which produced the greatest and most abiding effects 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 101 

upon the face of the world. He saw from the first the 
vast possibilities in the American continent. He saw 
that the only serious rivals to be feared were France 
or Spain, both powers having fleets and strong places 
on the other side of the Atlantic. With a view of 
detaching Spain from France, Pitt had sent friendly 
overtures to Spain coupled with the dazzling bribe of 
the conditional cession of Gibraltar in exchange for 
Minorca. He now determined to assail the French 
possessions in America on all sides at once. He grasped 
the essential condition of success, and saw the cause of 
the late disasters which had befallen his first attempts 
and those of his predecessors. It was necessary to 
send an overpowering force, and at the same time by 
our superior sea-power to intercept all reinforcements 
from Europe. This had failed in the year 1757. Pitt 
now prepared a still larger force, which was to be 
backed up with several fleets. He was bent on nothing 
short of driving the French flag from the whole North 
American continent. 

The preparations for the eventful year 1758 were 
on a formidable scale, which might make Walpole turn 
in his grave. Supplies were voted for about ten 
millions and a half. £1,861,000 was devoted to 
foreign subsidies. There were to be 60,000 seamen 
and 86,500 land forces, or including the Irish service, 
100,000 men. An immense fleet of forty-one ships 
under Admiral Boscawen was sent out in February to 
reinforce the fleet at Halifax. To cut off reinforce- 
ments from France, Spain, or the Mediterranean, Lord 
Hawke with seven ships was sent to blockade the 
French ports ; and Osborne with fifteen ships was sent 



102 CHATHAM [chap. 

to cruise along the coast of Spain, and cut off any fleet 
from the Spanish or Mediterranean ports. Young, 
daring, and ambitious soldiers were chosen for im- 
portant commands: Wolfe, Lord Howe, Amherst, 
Forbes, men of the stamp of Clive, who were promoted 
over all their seniors in rank. Pitt devised three 
separate expeditions, two directed against Canada, one 
into the Mississippi valley ; and he furnished all three 
with ample forces, elaborate instructions, and peremp- 
tory orders. The whole was based on exhaustive 
study of the local conditions and the strategical 
problems. 

The first expedition was directed against Louisburg 
in the island of Cape Breton, and was the most im- 
portant of all. Louisburg was the most valuable port 
that France possessed on the American continent. It 
commanded the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 
The fleet which made this its base could effectually 
close the whole length of the Eiver St. Lawrence and 
its valley, and prevent it from receiving succour by 
sea. Against that cardinal point in the defences of 
Canada, Admiral Boscawen and General Amherst were 
sent in June with a fleet of 150 sail and an army of 
nearly 12,000 men. The fortress was very strong and 
amply prepared for a siege. The invaders were far 
stronger in ships and in men, but were heavily impeded 
by bad weather. By the heroism of the young Wolfe 
and the audacity and resource of Boscawen's seamen, 
Louisburg fell in July, and with it the island of St. 
John's in the Gulf. The St. Lawrence was hence- 
forth closed to France. 

It is no part of the Life of Pitt to describe the opera- 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 103 

tions of war achieved by the fleets and armies he 
dispatched. When the ships had sailed across the 
Atlantic, the minister at home had no power to in- 
fluence the issue. The conquest of Canada, the cross- 
ing of the Alleghanies and securing to Britain the 
valley of the Ohio, belong to the history of England, 
to the biographies of Wolfe, Amherst, Forbes, and 
Washington, but only in general design concern the 
biographer of Pitt. The second expedition was aimed 
at that long basin stretching northwards from Fort 
William Henry at the foot of Lake George, through 
Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point to Lake Cham- 
plain, and thence by the Richelieu river to Sorel in 
the valley of St. Lawrence, half-way between Montreal 
and Quebec. The force destined to strike this blow 
consisted of some 15,000 troops, of whom 6000 were 
British regulars, with more than a thousand lake boats. 
They were commanded by General James Abercrombie, 
who owed his appointment more to political influence 
than to his own energy or resource ; but Pitt had 
chosen as his lieutenant and real leader the young 
and gallant Lord Howe, whom he himself called 
"the complete model of military virtue." Howe 
was named by his men and his brother officers, as 
by Wolfe himself, the best soldier in the British 
army ; and little doubt can exist that, had he lived 
to lead the expedition, its immense strength and 
equipment would have given it victory. But on the 
first day of landing from Lake George, in order to 
approach Ticonderoga, Howe was killed in a skirmish, 
possibly by a shot from his own men whilst he was 
leading the attack. Abercrombie was incapable of 



104 CHATHAM [chap. 

following up so adventurous an attack on a fort 
defended by the brilliant Montcalm with 3600 good 
men. After losing 2000 of his force, the feeble 
Abercrombie beat a retreat and was recalled home 
amidst the bitter groans of the government and the 
nation. 

A partial, and not unimportant success, was won 
by Bradstreet with a part of Abercrombie's force. 
Having persuaded that general to let him lead 3000 
provincial troops to the westwards against Fort Oswego 
on the Ontario Lake, he pushed across it and captured 
Fort Frontenac, which stand at the north-eastern end 
of Lake Ontario, whence the St. Lawrence river issues 
to the sea. With the surrender of Fort Frontenac, 
Bradstreet captured all the French ships on Lake 
Ontario, which henceforward served as a British base. 
By these simultaneous captures of Louisburg and 
Frontenac, though separated by nearly one thousand 
miles of waterway, the valley of the St. Lawrence 
was closed to the French, both at its source in Lake 
Ontario on the south-west, and on its outfall into 
the Gulf on the north-east. And at the same time 
the command of Lake Ontario brought the British 
within measurable distance of the headwaters of 
the Allegheny river whereon stood Fort Duquesne, 
the spot where the defeat and repulse of Braddock 
in 1755 had roused such just indignation and alarm. 

The third expedition was to pass due west from 
Pennsylvania, to cross the Alleghany Mountains and 
to attack Fort Duquesne ; which lies at the junction 
of several rivers all flowing into the Ohio, and is 
situated about three hundred miles from the Atlantic 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 105 

seaboard. This force consisted of 1400 Highlanders 
and about 5000 or 6000 Colonials. It had a very 
arduous task, owing to the approach of winter and 
the unknown road through virgin forests and a lofty 
mountain range. It was commanded by General 
Forbes, a soldier of great energy and prudence, 
having as his second, Colonel George Washington, 
whose splendid conduct in the rout of Braddock 
three years before had raised him to the command of 
the Colonial troops. Forbes started from Philadelphia 
in July ; but his excessive caution in advancing by 
stages from one fortified post to another, the moun- 
tainous route, and the bad weather, delayed him so 
that he did not reach Fort Duquesne until the end 
of November. He found it evacuated by the French 
and the fortifications blown up. Their force was 
wholly incapable of resisting Forbes's army ; and the 
capture of Frontenac by Bradstreet had stopped the 
supplies which were to reach them by way of 
the Northern Lakes. Fort Duquesne being destroyed, 
Forbes, stricken as he was with mortal disease, planted 
a new fort on this most dominant spot, to which he 
gave the name of Pitt. He wrote to Pitt (27th 
November): "I have used the freedom of giving 
your name to Fort Duquesne, as I hope it was in 
some measure the being actuated by your spirits 
that now makes us masters of the place/' 

Pitt in his reply (of 23rd January 1759) praises in 
fitting terms the well-concerted plan, the prudence, 
judgment, and resolution which has won this success 
"of the highest importance.'' He presses on the 
general the need of using every effort to retain 



106 CHATHAM [chap. 

control of the Ohio valley, to cultivate the loyal 
co-operation and union of the Colonists, and to con- 
ciliate and form alliances with the Indian tribes. The 
genius of Pitt at once descried the value of this new 
possession. Pittsburg stands on the junction of the 
Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers with the grand 
Ohio ; and with its dependencies it has to-day a 
population of quite half a million. It is one of the 
great industrial centres, and the point of junction 
of immense lines of railroad. Neither Pitt nor 
Washington, nor any man in that century, could 
possibly have foreseen that the new settlement was 
to grow into the greatest iron and coal centre of the 
world, as little as they could have imagined how a 
penniless Scotch lad would one day build up from 
out its lurid furnaces a colossal business, of which 
the profits were ultimately to spread across America 
and Britain the means of learning and culture. 1 How 
few of all the toilers in those mines and steel-yards, 
how few of all those citizens or tourists who pass 
through the Iron City towards the Northern Lakes 
or the Western plains, remember how the name of 
Pittsburg recalls the fact that Pitt and Washington, 
separated as they were by 3000 miles of ocean, com- 
bined in planting that dominant stronghold whence 
the Far West of the continent was ultimately secured 
to their common race. 

But an achievement far more brilliant in itself, and 

1 Andrew Carnegie, born at Dunfermline, and now of New York 
and Skibo Castle, developed at Pittsburg the immense steel-works, 
and thence accumulated the vast fortune which he has since devoted 
to the cause of public education. 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 107 

even more momentous in its issue on the future of 
the British Empire, was now undertaken by the 
aspiring genius of Pitt. It was nothing less than 
the conquest of Canada from the French, who had 
been in complete occupation of that vast district for 
two centuries. The central expedition was to ascend 
the St. Lawrence river and to attack the cities of 
Quebec and Montreal. But this was to be supported 
by three other lines of attack : one from the Lakes 
George and Champlain to the St. Lawrence; the 
second from Fort Niagara on Lake Ontario to reach 
the source of the St. Lawrence river ; the third from 
Pittsburg to Lake Erie. This vast area of combined 
operations, extending over an extent of six hundred 
or seven hundred miles through a wild country with 
virgin forests and unbridged rivers, could hardly be 
a complete success even in the most perfect conditions 
of modern war. The strategic conception was gigantic 
and practically beyond the resources of the age. No 
one of the three supporting movements quite effected 
its object or reached the goal — which was the St. 
Lawrence valley — in time. But important results 
were obtained by all three; and they greatly con- 
tributed to the ultimate triumph. 

The main task was entrusted to the youthful 
General James Wolfe — who, though then but thirty- 
two, had seen sixteen years of active service in war, 
and had fought in great and desperate battles in 
Germany, in France, and in America. At the age 
of twenty-one he had been publicly thanked by his 
commander. At twenty-two he had won his rank of 
Colonel. If he had been in command at Rochefort, 



108 CHATHAM [chap. 

it was believed the attack would have succeeded. The 
conquest of Cape Breton was mainly his work. This 
was the youthful hero — the Nelson of the Army he 
has been called — whom Pitt selected to lead the 
arduous task of the conquest of Canada. 

The young general was put in command of an army 
of some 8600 excellent soldiers, supported by a fleet 
which numbered in all nearly fifty sail. They were 
opposed by the gallant Montcalm, who had more than 
15,000 men, mostly native levies, with a strong and 
skilful contingent of Indians. The story of that 
amazing victory belongs rather to the history of 
England and of the British Empire than to the Life of 
Pitt. What Englishman does not know that stirring 
and pathetic epic ? How, for eleven weeks, the 
British force sought to pierce some joint in the vast 
defences that Montcalm had spread round Quebec — 
how the fortress, towering like another Gibraltar 
above the rushing tide of the St. Lawrence, seemed 
to defy the attacks, whilst Montcalm, with an army 
nearly double that of Wolfe, lay entrenched below its 
ramparts — how Wolfe himself, racked with disease, 
anxiety, and fever, having exhausted every device, 
and having lost a tenth of his whole command, wrote 
home to Pitt a dispatch full of ominous doubts, but 
ending with the promise of one last effort — how, by a 
kind of heroic intuition, he put his whole force on 
barges at night and silently stole past the sleeping 
enemy, till he reached the other side of the mighty 
fortress — how in the darkness a few thousand High- 
landers and Grenadiers scaled the precipitous crags 
which rise three hundred feet from the water's edge 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 109 

and dragged up there a single cannon — how in the 
morning the French general to his amazement found 
the British army drawn up in line of battle on the 
height which he had considered unscaleable, and had 
given no adequate guard — how a desperate battle took 
place under the walls of the citadel — short, sharp, 
and decisive, a battle wherein the first and second 
generals in command on both sides fell — how Wolfe 
was thrice wounded and died in the very arms of 
victory within a few yards of his noble opponent — 
how the memory of both is enshrined in one common 
monument, dear to Briton as to Frank — how this 
sudden, unhoped for, almost impossible triumph sent a 
thrill through the whole British race, and practically 
decided the mighty issue — the transfer of the Northern 
half of the American continent from the French to the 
English Crown. It is a household word with the 
English race; nor need the circumstances be again 
rehearsed in the Life of Pitt. The hand that did the 
deed was the hand of Wolfe. But the voice that 
bade it to be done — the eye that saw its future possi- 
bilities — the brain which conceived it, was the voice, 
the eye, the brain of Pitt. 

The joy of the nation, passing from the depths of 
anxiety to the extravagance of triumph, but darkened 
by the loss of the young leader, was well painted 
in the famous passage of Walpole's Memoirs. "The 
incidents of dramatic fiction could not be conducted 
with more address to lead an audience from despon- 
dency to sudden exultation, than accident prepared 
to excite the passions of a whole people. They de- 
spaired — they triumphed — and they wept — for Wolfe 



110 CHATHAM [chap. 

had fallen in the hour of victory ! Joy, grief, curi- 
osity, astonishment, were painted in every counten- 
ance; the more they inquired, the higher their 
admiration rose. Not an incident but was heroic 
and affecting ! " The popular instinct coupled the 
names of Pitt and Wolfe as the authors of this 
astonishing success, which even inspired the gentle 
soul of Cowper to celebrate them both together in 
his Task — a passage wherein patriotism has almost 
extinguished poetry. 

The capture of Quebec after a series of hazards and 
vicissitudes as striking as any in the history of war, 
was almost followed by its recapture. The French 
recovered from their panic, and severely defeated the 
British garrison, who were only saved by the timely 
arrival of a few ships of war. The French then with- 
drew up the St. Lawrence for a last stand at Montreal. 
From East, West, and South, three British forces 
were now concentrated on the city — one from the 
St. Lawrence, one from Lake Champlain, and one from 
Lake Ontario — the three concentric armies as origin- 
ally designed by Pitt, and now amounting to 17,000 
men. Slowly, but surely, in spite of extraordinary 
difficulties from virgin forests, rapids, and rocks, the 
three British armaments met at Montreal. Nothing 
remained to the gallant Frenchmen but unconditional 
surrender. On September 8, 1760, Canada and all 
its dependencies passed to the British Crown. French 
soldiers and sailors were sent back to France in British 
ships. Free exercise of religion, their local French 
law, and their property, were guaranteed to all 
Canadians and to all Frenchmen who chose to remain. 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 111 

Thus by a few sudden strokes, half a continent 
passed over to Great Britain. And for one hundred 
and forty years the vast wilderness north of the St. 
Lawrence and the Great Lakes, far away to the 
Pacific, has been steadily filling up with British 
settlers, and forming a vigorous element in the British 
Empire. But, socially and politically, the foundation 
of Fort Pitt, and the expulsion of the French from the 
valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, was an even 
more momentous achievement. A few years before 
1760, the French had claimed for their own sphere of 
influence the whole American continent north of the 
St. Lawrence and west of the Ohio. They mainly 
controlled the native Indian tribes, and they held 
military posts along the valleys of the St. Lawrence 
and of the Mississippi. This dominion was far too 
vast for France in the age of Louis xv. to maintain 
or to people. From the mouths of the Mississippi to 
Cape Breton, the key of the St. Lawrence, is a dis- 
tance of more than two thousand miles. The claim 
was not based on population, or any real power. But 
it had an imposing show, and it rested on a skilfully 
constructed network of forts. Had the claim been made 
good, more than half the American continent would 
have remained under the French flag, would have 
maintained the language, laws, and political system of 
France. 

Mr. J. P. Green, the Historian of the English 
People, tells us that " with the triumph of Wolfe, the 
history of the United States began," — " Pitt laid the 
foundation of the great Republic of the West." 
"Really a considerable Fact in the History of the 



112 CHATHAM [chap. 

World," says Carlyle — " Fact principally due to Pitt." 
This is no place to moralise over the fierce rivalry 
of races and the selfish ambition of statesmen. The 
historical facts are our immediate concern. And no 
years in modern history are more pregnant with 
incalculable issues than those closing years of the 
reign of George n., wherein it was finally decided that 
the English language, common law, literature, and 
blood, should be settled on the continent of America 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Arctic 
Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The Colonies felt the 
great future that was now opened to them with a 
clear vision which was hardly possible in Europe. 
The pulpits of New England resounded with thanks- 
giving, and a young preacher at Boston declared that, 
with the continued blessing of Heaven, the Colonies 
"will become, in another century or two, a mighty 
empire " — " not independent of the mother country," 
he added. Such are the forecasts of man ! 

Pull of visions of a transoceanic Empire to be, 
Pitt relentlessly pursued his scheme to crush the 
maritime power of France and of Spain, the only two 
powers which then had to be considered at sea. He 
saw clearly, as Captain Mahan has lucidly shown, 
that, if France had been driven from America and 
from India, and Spain had been checked in the West 
Indies, it had been effected by the naval ascendency 
of Britain. And as to Pitt and to the men of his 
age colonies meant exclusive Commerce, and the 
monopoly of Trade meant wealth, and commercial 
wealth meant national strength, Pitt passionately 
aimed at barring the rivals of his country from found- 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 113 

ing colonial possessions or pushing a transoceanic 
trade. He could nurse no illusion as to the possibility 
of holding any French territory in Europe. But he 
designed to crush any French settlement in any part of 
the world ; and he thoroughly understood that France 
would be exhausted in the effort to retain any trans- 
marine possession ; whilst, by supporting Frederick of 
Prussia, he caused her to drain herself in continental 
wars. 

These schemes were perfectly intelligible and con- 
sistently followed; and whatever we think of their 
justice or wisdom, they were designed by a true 
master of statecraft. The conquest of French colonies 
on the West Coast of Africa was followed by the 
capture of Guadeloupe and Marie Galante, and of some 
small islands in the West Indies. The French were 
now roused to make reprisals by a home-thrust on 
their enemy, and the Due de Choiseul boldly resolved 
on a fresh invasion of England. Great preparations 
were made at all ports ; transports were collected ; 
ships of the line equipped ; and troops assembled at 
various points. They supposed that, as large fleets 
and armies had been dispatched by Pitt to various 
parts of the world, a descent on the English coast 
might be effected. They did not rightly estimate the 
difference between a Pitt and a Newcastle. In 1756 
England had looked forward with alarm to a French 
invasion. In 1759 it was treated with scorn. 

The English minister calmly awaited the attack 
without weakening his forces abroad. He proudly 
reminded the Spanish government, which was being 
solicited by France as an ally, that the King's regular 



114 CHATHAM [chap. 

forces in these islands amounted to more than 40,000 
men, that thirty-five ships of the line, besides frigates, 
were manned and equipped for home service. Over and 
above this, the militia was called out in full ; bounties 
were offered to volunteer seamen and landsmen. 
Large sums in aid of parliamentary supplies were 
subscribed by London and the principal cities. A 
squadron was stationed off Dunkirk to blockade the 
French in that port; and a more powerful fleet under 
Admiral Hawke blockaded Brest. Rodney bombarded 
the French transports preparing in Havre. Boscawen 
with fourteen ships watched the port of Toulon in the 
Mediterranean ; and, when the French fleet had issued 
through the Straits of Gibraltar, he chased them and 
destroyed or took five ships off Cape Lagos, near the 
southern angle of Portugal; and he drove the re- 
mainder of the French ships into Cadiz, where they 
were blockaded. 

The French scheme of invasion was still persisted 
in. A violent storm in October, driving away the 
blockading forces, enabled two of their fleets to set 
sail ; one from Dunkirk, and one from Brest. The 
fleet that escaped from Dunkirk was driven round 
Scotland to Ireland, and finally was captured in the 
Irish Channel. The larger fleet from Brest was driven 
into Quiberon Bay, a most dangerous and rocky coast ; 
where Hawke, by splendid seamanship and rare 
audacity, broke up the fleet of Conflans of twenty-one 
ships of the line, and practically annihilated the navy 
of France. The naval victory of Quiberon Bay, gained 
almost entirely by skill and daring in handling ships 
in a gale on a treacherous coast, at a loss in killed of 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 115 

not more than forty men, ranks with La Hogue and 
Trafalgar in the history of the British navy. For a 
generation France ceased to be a great Sea Power. 

Not content with tearing from France her nascent 
dominion in India, her new colonies on the Senegal in 
Africa, some West Indian islands, and the whole of 
her vast territories on the North American continent, 
Pitt resolutely supported Frederick in his war with 
France and her allies, and gave him immense subsidies 
year by year, and no small forces on land. He de- 
clared " that America could be won in Germany " — 
meaning, no doubt, that if France was made a principal 
in the Seven Years' War to crush Prussia, and thus 
exhausted herself in the struggle, she would leave 
Canada and the Mississippi valley to be conquered by 
the British. Pitt, says Carlyle, was " King of England 
for four years/ 5 and proved himself to be Frederick's 
principal and almost his only help. "Blessing" is 
Carlyle's phrase; and, whether we accept that term 
or not, we may take the biographer's word for it that 
Frederick largely owed his salvation to Pitt's alliance, 
nor was he slow to acknowledge it. 

The events of that long and bloody strife belong to 
the history of Europe and of Germany, rather than to 
the Life of Pitt. The part played in it by England 
was intermittent, subordinate, and to a great extent 
financial. In four years Frederick received from 
England £2,680,000 sterling in money. Six treaties 
of alliance were made in the same period. Pitt began 
by taking the Hanoverian army of the Elector into 
English pay. He supported George n., when the King 
repudiated the treaty of Kloster-Zeven made by his 



116 CHATHAM [chap. 

son, which had opened Hanover to the French, and 
exposed Prussia on her north-western frontier. He 
then put the Hanoverian forces into the command 
of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, one of Frederick's 
best generals; and he placed a strong British con- 
tingent under the Prince's orders. At the battle of 
Minden, on the Weser, Ferdinand with inferior numbers 
inflicted a great defeat on the French. The English 
infantry and artillery contributed to the success in no 
small degree, and the enemy would have been utterly 
routed had it not been for the disloyal refusal of 
Lord George Sackville, the commander of the British 
cavalry, to obey the orders of the chief of whom he 
was jealous. Sackville was tried by court-martial, 
dismissed from the army, and was never forgiven by 
the King or by Pitt. The minister indeed gave the 
heartiest support to the German Prince, and placed 
his victory on a par with that of Hawke. The condi- 
tion of France, as Voltaire says, was now disastrous : 
her armies beaten — her navy destroyed — her public 
credit bankrupt. 

These tremendous efforts of Great Britain in four 
different continents had not been accomplished with- 
out a lavish sacrifice of ships, material, and money. 
When Pitt opened the session of 1758, he made no 
attempt to disguise the cost and the difficulties of the 
situation. He seemed to glory in his lavish estimates 
— " heaps of millions," he said, " must be raised." In 
that year £10,486,457 was voted ; 60,000 seamen and 
86,500 land forces, and 14,000 for Ireland. For the 
year 1759, £12,761,310 was voted. For the year 1760, 
£15,503,563 was voted, with an army of 100,000 



vi.] FIRST MINISTRY 117 

men, and also 20,000 militia. The year 1760 was 
the crowning moment of Pitt's war ministry. Madras 
was added to Calcutta ; Canada and the Ohio valley 
were cleared of the French ; four West Indian islands 
had been captured, and the Senegal colony in Africa. 
The French ports in the Bay of Biscay and in the 
Mediterranean had been continuously blockaded, and 
the navy of France had been annihilated. Lagos, 
Quebec, Minden, Quiberon Bay, were decisive victories. 
And twenty thousand British troops were fighting in 
Germany in support of the King of Prussia. The 
instinct of the nation justly attributed these rapid 
triumphs to the inspiration of the statesman who 
designed them. And our historian has confirmed this 
view in words of hearty applause. " The ardour of his 
soul had set the whole kingdom on fire. It inflamed 
every soldier who dragged the cannon up the heights 
of Quebec, and every sailor who boarded the French 
ships among the rocks of Brittany. The minister, 
before he had been long in office, had imparted to the 
commanders whom he employed his own impetuous, 
adventurous, and defying character." 

In the same year a sudden event changed the whole 
face of the political world, and reacted profoundly on 
the career of Pitt. George n. died by a rupture of 
the heart at Kensington, at the age of seventy-seven. 
Having resisted the claims of Pitt for many years, and 
having excluded him from many ministries, George 
had at last given Pitt his entire confidence, and had 
zealously seconded all his schemes. It was truly 
said that Pitt had been King these four years. As 
Mr. Goldwin Smith has happily expressed it : " Pitt's 



118 CHATHAM [chap. vi. 

ideal was to be a 6 Patriot King ? — only his King was 
to be William — not George." But George n. was now 
succeeded by George in., who had been trained from 
boyhood by his mother to insist on being King him- 
self, who was utterly out of sympathy with Pitt as 
a man and with his policy as a statesman, and who 
was under the influence of a feeble and ambitious 
favourite. The first object of both was to undermine 
and displace Pitt. From this day he ceases to wield 
the power of England, and to be responsible for the 
era of vacillating counsels and short-sighted measures 
to which she was soon to be committed. 



CHAPTEE VII 

FALL FROM POWER 

From October 1760/ when George n. died, until 
October 1761, when Pitt resigned office, he was in 
name First Minister, but he was not in power, he 
was no longer " king." George in., destined to be 
for many years the evil genius of our country, bred 
up an Englishman, a Tory, and a bigot, had small 
care for Hanover, little interest in continental politics, 
and was resolved to have his own way in spite of the 
Magnates, Parliament, or the People. His aim was 
to free himself from the entanglement of foreign wars, 
from popular pressure, and from Pitt. His first act 
was to call to the Cabinet Lord Bute, the favourite 
of his mother, whom he at once made his chief coun- 
sellor and agent. George's first speech to his Council 
was drawn up by Bute, without concert with Pitt or 
other ministers. As spoken, it talked of "a bloody 
and expensive war, and of obtaining an honourable 
and lasting peace." Sentiments in themselves sound, 
and now shared by the better part of the nation ; but 
manifestly aimed at the policy of the great minister. 
Pitt at once went to Bute and, after a long altercation, 
had the printed report of the King's speech changed 

119 



120 CHATHAM [chap. 

to " an expensive, but just and necessary war " ; and, 
after honourable peace, he got inserted the words "in 
concert with our allies." 

In a few months Lord Bute was made Secretary of 
State conjointly with Pitt, and virtually displacing 
him ; Legge was dismissed from the Exchequer ; and 
the whole Cabinet, except Lord Temple, were pre- 
paring to make an end both of war and of Pitt. 
France was now opening negotiations for peace. 
Whether these were sincere may be doubted, as the 
French minister, the Due de Choiseul, was at the 
same time making secret overtures to Spain to join 
France, and Spain was pressing France to continue 
the war. Pitt was willing to consider the French 
terms of treaty, which were on the basis of uti possi- 
detis, but with different dates for India, America, and 
Europe (1st September, 1st July, 1st May, 1761). 
Whilst willing to send an envoy, Pitt pressed on the 
attack upon Belle Isle, a rocky island lying off the 
coast of Brittany. Worthless as it was in itself, its 
possession would be a standing humiliation to France, 
and would serve to blockade the Breton coast and the 
mouth of the Loire. Thither Pitt sent a squadron 
and an army of 12,000 men. After an obstinate 
defence the garrison of 3500 men capitulated and 
surrendered the island. With this fresh conquest in 
his hands, Pitt offered peace on the terms of uti possi- 
detis, either on the signature of the treaty or for the 
dates of 1st July, 1st September, and 1st November. 
Long pourparlers and reciprocal offers and concessions 
passed between Paris and London, in which it may 
be doubted if either side was quite sincere. When 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 121 

Choiseul demanded the restitution of Cape Breton at 
the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and Pitt insisted on 
continuing to support Prussia in arms, it may be 
taken that the two diplomatists were playing a game 
of bluff. 

At the end of July, Pitt's demands for a Treaty 
were : — 

(1) The cession of all Canada, its dependencies, 

and all islands in the Gulf and river of 
St. Lawrence, with the exclusive right of 
fishing there. He rejected the French terms 
as to Louisiana. 

(2) The cession by Prance of Senegal and Goree in 

Africa. 

(3) Dunkirk to be reduced as stipulated at Utrecht 

in 1713. 

(4) Equal partition of the four Neutral Islands in 

the West Indies. 

(5) The island of Minorca to be restored to Eng- 

land. 

(6) All French conquests in Germany, whether taken 

from Hesse, Brunswick, Hanover, or Prussia, 
to be restored and evacuated. 
In return England would surrender the islands 
of Belle Isle, and Guadeloupe and Marie Gal- 
ante in the West Indies. 
These terms, as might be expected, were rejected 
by France. 

Pitt held firm, resolved that " no Peace of Utrecht 
should stain the annals of England," continuing to use 
the imperious tone in which he had received all over- 
tures. And he now became aware that an attempt was 



122 CHATHAM [chap. 

being made to drag Spain into the quarrel. Choiseul, 
indeed, committed the fatal blunder of insisting that 
Spain as well as France had grievances to be redressed. 
He had the impudence to send a dispatch formulating 
a series of demands on behalf of Spain. It was indeed 
a gross diplomatic offence for France, when treating 
for peace, to propose new hostile demands in the name 
of a power with whom England was ostensibly on 
friendly terms. Whether definitely so informed or 
not, Pitt divined the existence of concert between 
the powers. His indignation boiled over in language 
which he might have used to Newcastle or to Fox, 
but which was strange to the conventions of diplo- 
matic intercourse. " His Majesty will not suffer the 
disputes with Spain to be blended in any manner 
whatever in the negotiation of peace between the 
two Crowns. — It will be considered an affront to his 
Majesty's dignity. It is expected that France will not 
at any time presume a right of intermeddling in such 
disputes between Great Britain and Spain" 

Pitt now saw clearly that neither France nor Spain 
desired peace on any terms which he would accept. 
And, in fact, on 15th August the " Family Compact" 
was signed. It was nothing less than an offensive 
and defensive alliance between the two Bourbon 
Monarchies, binding them to make no terms with their 
common enemies except by common consent. And, by 
a separate and secret treaty, Spain undertook, in ex- 
change for the restoration of Minorca by France, to 
declare war on England on 1st May 1762, if France 
and England should be then engaged in hostilities. 
This was in fact the very alliance of the House of 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 123 

Bourbon which had led to the War of the Spanish 
Succession. The treaty and its terms were kept secret ; 
but Pitt soon understood its meaning; and, by the 
middle of September, he was warned by his agents of 
the preparations for war then being made in Spain. 

He immediately broke off the negotiations with 
France, recalled his envoy from Paris, and dismissed 
the French envoy from London. Pitt now kept strictly 
in his own hands the negotiations which had been pro- 
tracted for some four months. They are very intricate 
and continually varied, raising many important pro- 
blems, amongst them the Newfoundland Fisheries 
question, which has embarrassed diplomacy for some 
two centuries and was settled only in our own day. 
But it is not necessary here to describe these elaborate 
negotiations, in which France was not well served, and 
England was represented by a man of imperious nature 
and insatiable patriotism. Choiseul was no doubt 
anxious to save his king and country in their desperate 
strait, but he was not willing to pay Pitt's price, which 
meant the sacrifice of all France had won in Germany 
as well as of all she had lost in the Far East and the 
Far West. With Pitt the sine qua non of peace involved 
the upholding of Frederick of Prussia. On that he 
wrote, " his Majesty's intentions will be found fixed 
and unalterable." With Choiseul, the sine qua non was 
the vindication of Maria Theresa, the maintenance of 
the House of Bourbon, and the means of restoring the 
French navy. Pitt was ready to settle all extra- 
European questions, provided they could be arranged 
so as to secure the triumphs of his country in war. He 
would not make a fresh Peace of Utrecht, nor would 



124 CHATHAM [chap. 

he abandon Frederick. And the suggestion of a con- 
spiracy to found a new Bourbon preponderance in 
Europe roused him to fierce indignation. 

Not content with breaking off negotiations with 
France, Pitt insisted on declaring war with Spain. 
Macaulay has pronounced this to be " a wise and 
resolute counsel " ; and, from the point of view of in- 
creasing the ascendency of Britain it was not only this, 
but almost inevitable. Pitt urged that Spain was 
manifestly preparing for war, her treasure-ships and 
merchantmen could be seized on their way to Europe 
and would defray the cost of the war, and her American 
colonies could be seized without any new armaments. 
He conceived a grand scheme to despoil Spain of her 
colonies as he had despoiled France of hers. He 
arranged for a descent on Panama, and thence the con- 
quest of Spanish America ; from that he would seize 
Havannah, the Philippine Islands, and Manilla. On 
18th September 1761 he represented to the Council 
his purpose of immediate war with Spain. " If any war 
could provide its own resources," he said, " it was war 
with Spain. Her supplies lay at a distance, and as 
we were masters of the sea, might easily be cut off." 
" Such a bold but necessary procedure would teach not 
only Spain but Europe the dangerous presumption of 
dictating to Great Britain." Louis le Grand in all his 
glory, befooled by all his flatterers, had hardly used 
bigger words. But, as Pitt himself said in later years, 
"the Council trembled." All members of the Cabinet, 
except Temple, raised objections to a new war. 

The Cabinet delayed, and held three adjourned 
sittings. Pitt pressed his views with renewed energy. 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 125 

" This was the time for humbling the whole House of 
Bourbon ; if this opportunity were neglected, it might 
never be recovered ; and, if he could not prevail in 
this instance, it was the last time he should sit in 
council. He thanked the ministers of the late King 
[not those brought in by George in.] for their sup- 
port; he was himself called to the ministry by the 
voice of the people, to whom he considered himself 
accountable for his conduct ; and he would no longer 
remain in a situation which made him responsible for 
measures which he. was no longer allowed to guide." 

This was in the vein of Scipio Africanus before the 
Senate, or of Oliver Cromwell dismissing the Long 
Parliament, rather than the tone of a constitutional 
minister in a Cabinet Council. On this occasion his 
colleagues do not seem to have " trembled," but they 
refused to follow him. And the President, the veteran 
Carteret-Granville, is said to have retorted, " that he 
was not sorry the gentleman would leave them, as in 
any other case they would have to leave him. When 
he talks of being responsible to the people, he talks 
the language of the House of Commons, and forgets 
that at this board he is only responsible to the King." 
We have no proof that either of these speeches was 
correctly reported. But in substance they represent 
the conflicting views of Pitt and his colleagues. On 
5th October 1761 Pitt and Lord Temple resigned their 
places, after submitting their views in a written paper 
to the King. 

This was a truly momentous event, affecting the 
history of Britain, of Europe, and even of the world. 
The passion and folly of the new King of Spain and 



126 CHATHAM [chap. 

the blind ambition of Spanish and French ministers 
made a Spanish war inevitable. Within a few months 
Spain herself declared war, in spite of the pacific 
tendencies of George in. and his new advisers. In 
that war not a few of the schemes planned by Pitt and 
the results he had foreseen actually took effect. The 
pride of France would not brook, in spite of all her 
disasters and her exhaustion, to surrender all her 
colonies as well as all she had fought for in Europe ; 
to give up all her hopes of founding a great Eastern 
and a great Western Empire, and at the same time to 
suffer Prussia to rise to the position of a first-class 
power in Germany. That, however, was exactly what 
Pitt was resolved to effect. Nor can it be doubted that, 
if circumstances had favoured him, this result would 
have been effected far more completely than it was. 

The position of Great Britain at the close of the 
year 1761 was one of absolute dominion of the seas to 
an extent hardly ever equalled before or since. Having 
150 ships of the line, besides fleets of lesser vessels, 
manned by nearly 80,000 seamen, who were at that 
period without any rivals, England was perfectly 
secure at home, whilst she held the commerce of the 
seas and all transoceanic settlements within her grasp. 
No other nation possessed even the nucleus of marine 
power; and all were debarred from reaching such 
colonies as they still retained. Had George n. lived 
a few years longer, had Pitt maintained his health, his 
influence with the King, Parliament, and the Nation, 
it was quite probable that every possession of France, 
Spain, or Holland, outside of Europe, would have 
passed to the British Crown, and that these countries 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 127 

would have been forced to make peace on terms of 
extreme humiliation. 

Britain alone was neither exhausted nor drained of 
money or of men. A war to conquer commerce and 
colonies, rather than settled territories, not only paid 
its own way, but was actually a new source of wealth 
and strength. The crowning victory of Quiberon Bay, 
where the fleet of France was annihilated, had cost us 
but forty lives. Had Pitt been suffered to seize the 
Spanish treasure-ships, he would have paid the cost of 
the war with Spain twice over. British trade and 
prosperity had never risen so high as during the war. 
When the City of London carved on the monument of 
Pitt the memorable words that "commerce had been 
made to flourish by war," it was not at all an idle 
boast. It was recognised as a fact by another genera- 
tion after Pitt's death. The supplies voted for 1761 
were nearly £20,000,000 — i.e. nearly twice as much 
as was voted in 1758, and £4,000,000 more than the 
votes for 1760. In Walpole's time they had been 
£8,000,000. 1 Everything points to the conclusion 
that if Pitt had retained his authority and his mental 
force for a short period more, he would have raised 
the ascendency of his country to a point of pre- 
dominance of which modern history has but rare 
examples. 

Whether this result would have promoted the cause 
of civilisation, or even the untimate good of our own 
country, is a very different thing. Any attempt to 
crush back the rival nations of Europe into a second- 

i Pitt's war policy had raised the National Debt from £70,000,000 
to £150,000,000. 



128 CHATHAM [chap. 

ary rank, to maintain a permanent and exclusive domi- 
nation on the high seas, must at last evoke a combined 
resistance, and in the end must exhaust an island of 
moderate size. The morality of such a national policy 
cannot now be defended or excused. All that can be 
said is that the standards of the eighteenth century 
were not those of the twentieth century, even after 
all the debasement these standards have suffered of 
late. In that age of furious colonial rivalries, of 
visions of transoceanic dominion, all nations possess- 
ing seacoasts and maritime facilities and people, were 
equally eager to found an empire. The advantages of 
geography, our national faculties, free institutions, and 
teeming population, enjoyed by Great Britain, secured 
her in the hands of a great man a rapid and splendid 
triumph. But neither the statesmen of France or 
Spain, and assuredly no prince of any Hohenzollern, 
Bourbon, or Hapsburg House, could cast the first stone 
at Pitt. 

He has been charged with being drunk with war, 
delighting in war for itself; but this is a gross 
caricature of Pitt's ambition. Pitt himself saw no 
fighting, and had no such thirst for battle as consumed 
Alexander or Napoleon. The latter part of his life 
was filled with strenuous opposition to war and to 
exclusive domination. Pitt had no love of war. He 
loved his country with passion; and his ambition 
was to make his country the first in the world, to 
hand on to generations to come a mighty and stable 
inheritance. It was the ambition of Frederick, of 
Marlborough, of Dupleix, of Lally, of Montcalm, of 
Choiseul, of Alberoni, as it was of Pitt. But of them 



vii.] FALL EROM POWER 129 

all, Frederick and Pitt alone have founded vast 
empires which, after one hundred and forty years 
of growth, are still growing to-day. 

In the Annual Register for 1761, Edmund Burke 
wrote : " Under him for the first time administration 
and popularity were seen united. . . . Alone this 
Island seemed to balance the rest of Europe. He 
revived the military genius of our people ; he supported 
our allies ; he extended our trade ; he raised our 
reputation; he augmented our dominions." 

Our own generation has so long forgotten the real 
conditions of 1761, and has so much overrated the 
blundering exploits of the puny imitators of Pitt, 
that it may be well to recall the famous peroration 
of Macaulay, for his words are as literally true as 
they are eloquent and just. 

" The situation which Pitt occupied at the close of 
the reign of George the Second was the most enviable 
ever occupied by any public man in English history. 
He had conciliated the King ; v 3 domineered over 
the House of Commons ; he was adored by the people ; 
he was admired by all Europe. He was the first 
Englishman of his time ; and he had made England 
the first country in the world. The Great Commoner, 
the name by which he was often designated, might 
look down with scorn on coronets and garters. The 
nation was drunk with joy and pride. . . . Whigs 
and Tories, Churchmen and Puritans, spoke with 
equal reverence of the Constitution, and with equal 
enthusiasm of the talents, virtues, and services of the 
Minister." 

Walpole tells us that, on Pitt's fall, it was difficult 



130 CHATHAM [chap. 

to say " which exulted most, France, Spain, or Bute." 
" The nation was thunderstruck, alarmed, and indig- 
nant." When Pitt resigned the seals, the King received 
him graciously and offered him any rewards in the 
power of the Crown to grant. Surprised at such a 
reception, he burst into tears. " Pardon me, Sir/' he 
said, " such goodness overpowers, it oppresses me." 
With his excitable temperament, with the extravagant 
reverence he felt for Majesty, the young George's 
manner had touched a genuine cord in Pitt's heart ; 
but he made no demand. Bute pressed him to accept 
the governorship of Canada, with a salary of five 
thousand pounds, or the chancellorship of the Duchy, 
with its large salary. Pitt refused these or any other 
office. Nor would he accept a peerage. He agreed 
to accept the title of Baroness of Chatham for his 
wife and a pension of £3000 a year for his own and 
two lives. 

At the time and since much satire has been heaped 
on Pitt for his deigning to accept a title and a pension. 
It was thought that he who had talked so loud against 
the system of buying political support, and about his 
own dependence on the people, not on the Court, 
would have disdained such common rewards. As 
Burke says, " a torrent of low and illiberal abuse was 
poured out." His scandalous sister, Anne, maliciously 
reminded him that, when she herself had obtained a 
pension by truckling to Bute, he had replied that 
"he grieved to see the name of Pitt in the list of 
pensions." This was a nasty riposte, but the pensions 
given to Anne and to William Pitt had not been 
earned in exactly the same way. 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 131 

The idea of William Pitt having ever been influ- 
enced by the pension was absurd, and his whole after 
life refuted it. And Burke is undoubtedly right in 
saying that "it is a shame that any defence should 
be necessary." Lord Holderness, a great peer and a 
nonentity, received on his retirement from the same 
office a pension of £4000. The grant of a pension for 
public services on retirement was in those days almost 
universal ; and in our own days it is common enough. 
Pitt had devoted his whole life to the public service 
for twenty-four years, since he had been summarily 
dismissed from the army. He had no fortune, and 
he had rejected the possible means of making a 
fortune. He was married to a lady born and bred 
in a family of rank and wealth. The public idea of 
his Eoman austerity and independence was honour- 
able to him — but to such a man as Pitt wildly 
chimerical. Though in public life he was as haughty 
and as masterful as Coriolanus, he was by no means 
in private life a Cincinnatus who could plough his 
own humble furrow at home. He valued what 
Disraeli has praised in the nobles of our day, "the 
cultured magnificence of their stately lives." Every- 
thing about Pitt was grandiose — his mansion, his 
equipage, his footmen, his liveries, and his plate. In 
private as in public expenditure he was all through 
his life utterly reckless, and indifferent to cost. 
Lavish display was the almost universal habit of all 
public personages in the eighteenth century not only 
in England, but throughout Europe. Walpole, Chester- 
field, Newcastle, Fox, Temple, Granville, all lived the 
lives of splendid magnates, as did the grands seigneurs 



132 CHATHAM [chap. 

and prelates of France, Spain, Italy, or Germany. 
Frederick, Turgot, Washington, Burke, were the few 
exceptions. They were rare instances of men in 
power who chose to live with great moderation. And 
it is clear that Pitt, popular tribune as he claimed to 
be, never aspired to be one of those noble examples of 
Spartan simplicity and plain living. 

Much too has been said of the abject servility in the 
language Pitt used on the acceptance of his dignities. 
He threw himself " at the royal feet " — he was " pene- 
trated with the bounteous favour of a most benign 
sovereign and master." He has not words to express 
his gratitude for the " unbounded grace of the most 
benign of sovereigns M — who had just kicked his great 
servant out of his sight. He even assures Lord Bute 
" of the value he puts on the favourable sentiments he 
had shown," in intriguing the dismissal. We do not 
use such language now. But it was the "common 
form" of that age. Pitt's bow was always the most 
profound and ceremonious at Court. The wits said 
" you could see his hook nose between his legs." If 
he entered the Royal closet he fell on his knees. The 
least peep into the closet, said Burke, intoxicates him. 
His letters of ordinary compliment were cast in that 
Ciceronian, or rather Grandisonian, solemnity which 
was the keynote of his written style. Nearly all the men 
of that age were grossly addicted either to pomp or to 
grandiloquence : some to both. But it must be allowed 
that Pitt very largely overdid the practice of his time. 

Macaulay's famous rebuke is hardly too severe — 
" Pitt was an almost solitary instance of a man of real 
genius, and of a brave, lofty, and commanding spirit, 



vii.] FALL PROM POWER 138 

without simplicity of character." Pitt certainly was 
not simple, but it would be absurd to say that one who 
is not simple cannot be great or magnanimous. In 
the age of Louis xiv., of Chesterfield, of Marlborough, 
the golden age of the Dukes and Princes of Europe, 
what was called "a fine manner" was not only 
regarded as a merit in itself, but was a real source 
of power to those who chose to use it. Some really 
great men and some men of genius have deliberately 
cultivated the theatric arts. Alexander, Napoleon, 
Elizabeth, Richelieu, Byron, Chateaubriand, Victor 
Hugo, were not exactly simple, nor always natural. 
Pitt perhaps was never simple except with his children. 
But it would be a mistake to judge him by this some- 
what petty foible. It is a mark of meanness to make 
too much fuss about mean things. Satirists who know 
nothing of Pitt's great achievements, dish up for us 
the scandalous epigrams of Walpole and Macaulay 
about his crutch, his flannels, and his black velvet 
suit. Pitt did not like to be caught in the grotesque 
dishabille of an invalid. Even Julius Caesar liked to 
cover his bald head with a wreath. 

Bute took care to have Pitt's honour and pension 
announced in the Gazette along with his retirement. 
Libels, insults, and merriment poured forth from his 
enemies, but his friends and the City of London stood 
by his side. The citizens pressed him to attend the 
Guildhall banquet ; and the restless and tactless 
Temple persuaded him to go in a somewhat ostenta- 
tious way in the Earl's chariot. King George and his 
young bride were received with chilling silence. The 
fallen minister was hailed with roars of delight, which 



134 CHATHAM [chap. 

were resumed in the Guildhall, with rounds of cheers 
led by Alderman Beckford, the Lord Mayor of 1762. 
The royal guests were ignored; riots ensued in the 
streets; gross caricatures were displayed; and Bute 
was only saved from violence by being guarded by a 
gang of hired bruisers. 

Pitt's conduct after his fall was restrained and 
magnanimous. As Burke said, "it set a seal on his 
character." And Macaulay declares that his genius 
and virtue never shone so brightly as during the 
session of 1762. He forbore to attack the colleagues 
who had ejected him. He even supported them. He 
avoided any claim to exclusive merit in all the suc- 
cesses past. When the government was forced into 
war with Spain, he disclaimed any triumph. He 
urged unanimity. " The moment was come for every 
man to show himself for the whole. Be one people ! 
Forget everything but the public ! — for the public I 
forget both my wrongs and my infirmities." He pro- 
tested against abandoning the King of Prussia. " If 
our troops were recalled from Germany, he himself 
would be robbed of his honour, as the fear of it had 
already robbed him of his sleep. If we abandoned 
our allies, God would abandon us." "America had 
been conquered in Germany." " Prince Ferdinand had 
been the saviour of Europe, and had shattered the 
whole military power of that military monarchy, 
France. If every other man in the House should be 
against the German war, he would stand single, and 
undergo the shame." Such was the passion that 
Pitt threw into the cause of aiding the newly formed 
kingdom of Prussia. 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 135 

And now Pitt's anticipations were verified. Spain 
having got the treasure-ships safe into Cadiz changed 
her tone, haughtily refused to divulge the " Family 
Compact/' recalled her ambassador and opened war. 
France and Spain in concert invaded Portugal, our 
ally. The last dispatch of the Spanish ambassador 
is described by Pitt's biographer as "his Catholic 
Majesty's declaration of war against the person of 
William Pitt." It is indeed a singular document. 
The war in which Spain and England were about to 
be plunged, it said, was to be charged " only to the 
pride and to the unmeasurable (sic) ambition " of the 
man — who had ceased to hold office for three months. 
His Spanish Majesty complained " of the insulting 
manner in which all the affairs of Spain had been 
treated during Mr. Pitt's administration." As will 
be seen, Pitt had been for three or four months utterly 
powerless in the Council and Parliament of George in., 
— who was himself bent on peace, who had dismissed 
Pitt rather than enter into war. 

War with Spain was declared on 4th January 1762. 
Although the ministry had been forced into it against 
their wish, and maintained it with half a heart, the 
spirit that Pitt had infused into the army and the 
navy, and the designs he had prepared, brought it to 
so triumphant a success that we are told the glorious 
campaign of 1762 was only inferior to that of 1759. 
Martinique and the French islands of Grenada, St. 
Lucia, and St. Vincent in the West Indies were 
captured. After a severe resistance, Havannah, the 
key of Cuba, was taken ; and in the East the settlement 
of Manila and the Philippines. Five thousand men 



136 CHATHAM [chap. 

and a fleet were sent to defend Portugal. The caustic 
wit of Walpole put the public effervescence in an 
epigram. The eloquence of Pitt, he wrote, shines 
months after it has set, like an annihilated star. " I 
tell you it has conquered Martinico. There is more 
martial spirit in the Gazette than in half Thucydides. 
The Komans were three hundred years in conquering 
the world. We subdue the globe in three campaigns 
— and a globe as big again." Sir R. Lyttelton at 
Eome wrote that these successes astonished all Europe. 
The Pope told an English gentleman that so great was 
the national glory, "that he esteemed it the highest 
honour to be born an Englishman." His Holiness 
apparently was out of temper with his Catholic 
Majesty. 

France and Spain were now both ready for peace — 
almost as ready as were King George and Bute. 
England had neither been intimidated nor injured by 
the " Family Compact." l In truth, the three nations 
as well as their governments and sovereigns desired 
rest. And the King of Sardinia practically acted as 
mediator in the complicated settlement. The terms 
were these : — 

(1) France surrendered to England the island of 
Minorca ; in Africa, Senegal ; in America, the islands 
of Cape Breton, St. John, and all Canada; in the 
West Indies, Grenada, Dominica, St. Vincent, and 
Tobago. She evacuated the conquests made on Prussian 

1 " The nation which won in this war was that which had used its 
sea-power in peace to increase its wealth, and in war to enlarge its 
empire by the number of its seamen and the extent of its seaboard 
and base " (Mahan. Sea-Power, p. 328). 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 137 

territory, arid restored those in Hanover, Hesse, and 
Brunswick. She agreed to reduce the new defences 
of Dunkirk. 

(2) On her side, England restored to France the 
island of Belle Isle ; in India, Pondicherry and recent 
conquests, but without forts ; in Africa, Goree ; in the 
West Indies, the islands of Martinique, Guadaloupe, 
Marie Galante, and St. Lucia. The French right of 
fishery in Newfoundland was confirmed as in the old 
treaties ; and the small islands adjoining, of St. Pierre 
and Miquelon, were ceded to their fishermen to cure 
their fish. France and England mutually agreed to 
withdraw their troops from Germany. Frederick was 
left to fight it out with Russia and Austria. 

(3) On her side, Spain restored to Portugal all that 
she had recently taken. She ceded to England the 
province of Florida; and in exchange received the 
restoration of Havannah and of the Philippines. She 
ceded the right to cut timber in Honduras, and with- 
drew the truly preposterous claim she had set up to 
rights of fishery in Newfoundland — a claim which 
Pitt, in his tragedy-king vein, said he would only 
acknowledge when the King of Spain had stormed the 
Tower of London. 

This famous Treaty of Paris of 1763 was on the 
whole a gain to all the countries involved, and in its 
general lines secured a long period of peace. It was 
somewhat less favourable to England than the terms 
which Pitt had demanded, and certainly much less 
than those he would have demanded after the conquests 
of 1762. In three points, Pitt would have exacted 
higher terms. He would have retained the West 



138 CHATHAM [chap. 

Indian Islands; he would have rejected the Newfound- 
land fishery claims of France as well as of Spain ; he 
would not have abandoned Prussia. As to Spain, 
which practically ceded little after a disastrous war, 
Pitt would have held on to Cuba and the Philippines, 
which Spain has only lost in our own day. And it is 
significant that the fishery problem was still in debate 
with France after one hundred and forty years. Lord 
Chesterfield, in many ways the keenest and coolest 
brain of the age, said at the time that the fishery- 
dispute would go on just as it did before and had done 
since 1713. 

At the bar of humanity and civilisation it must be 
judged that the Peace was salutary and just. But we 
can understand the feelings of Pitt and those whom 
he inspired, that much which had been won by lavish 
sacrifice of blood and treasure was being flung away in 
the inglorious haste of the King and his creatures to 
obtain a free hand at home, and to establish a personal 
government of the Crown. Had Pitt retained his 
mastery of the state in 1761 and 1762, it is probable 
that he would have swept into the Empire all the 
colonies of France and Spain both in the East and 
in the West ; and would have established a maritime 
tyranny against which the whole of Europe would 
have risen in just indignation. The narrowness rather 
than the humanity of George in., and the weakness 
rather than the wisdom of his ministers, saved Europe 
from this misfortune and England from this career of 
arrogant aggrandisement. 

When the Peace came to be considered in Parlia- 
ment, great anxiety existed in the government ; for in 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 139 

the trading classes and in London its terms were 
thought to be inadequate, and the opposition of Pitt, 
whom Chesterfield called ipse agmen, might undo the 
work of months of negotiation. Fox had been pro- 
moted to lead the House of Commons, as the Hector 
who alone could meet Achilles in the open. Vast sums 
were spent in buying the votes of members, and all 
who opposed the Court and Ministers were dismissed 
from office by a monstrous wholesale proscription rang- 
ing from dukes to office-porters. A venal or terrorised 
majority was first secured. The debate opened, and 
Pitt was said to be confined to his room with a severe 
attack of gout. But now the House was alarmed by a 
loud shouting without. The doors opened, and at the 
head of a concourse of his friends was seen Mr. Pitt, 
borne in the arms of his servants, who set him down 
within the bar, and with the help of his crutch and 
some friendly hands he crawled to his seat. He was 
dressed in black velvet, his legs wrapped in flannel, 
buskins of black cloth on his feet, and thick gloves on 
his hands. His face was emaciated, and he had the 
air of intense suffering. His voice was low, and from 
time to time he obtained the rare privilege of resuming 
his seat, whilst continuing to speak. His speech held 
the House for three hours and a half. In effect, he 
spoke thus : — 

" He said that, though suffering excruciating torture, he 
came at the hazard of his life to raise his voice against a treaty 
which obscured all the glories of the war, surrendered the 
dearest interests of the nation, and sacrificed the public faith 
by an abandonment of our allies. He began with the Fisheries 
in Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence. The concession to 
France would enable her to recover her marine and to regain 



140 CHATHAM [chap. 

her sea-power. He would, if he could, have insisted on the 
entire and exclusive fishery for our country. Havannah was 
an important conquest. He would have made it earlier had 
he been allowed to act. With Havannah ours, all the Spanish 
treasures in America lay at our mercy. The acquisition of 
Florida was no equivalent for the cession of Cuba. He would 
have kept Guadaloupe, had he been free. But now they cede 
not only Guadaloupe, but Martinique also, nay St. Lucia, the 
only valuable one of the neutral islands. Why did they 
conquer Martinique if they meant to restore it ? They * had 
lost sight of the great fundamental principle that France is 
chiefly, if not solely, to be dreaded by us in the light of a 
maritime and commercial power.' The Fisheries and the 
West India Islands will one day enable her to become for- 
midable to us at sea. If Britain retained the exclusive trade 
with the West Indies, with Africa, with India, she would gain 
immensely in wealth and in command of the seas. This 
they were handing over to France. As to Germany, it was 
the employment of the French army there which had enabled 
us to make our conquests in America. The gallant King of 
Prussia was fighting in the same cause as ourselves, and is 
suffering for us. There were now new powers in Europe. 
Holland and Sweden had declined, and Russia ' had started 
up in its own orbit extrinsically of all other systems; but 
gravitating to each according to the mass of attracting in- 
terests it contains/ (Surely a marvellous bit of insight in 
1762 !) ' Another power, against all human expectation, was 
raised in Europe in the House of Brandenburgh.' (Surely, 
insight no less remarkable !) ' The balance of power in Eu- 
rope has been entirely altered.' ' The German war prevented 
the French from succouring her colonies and islands in 
America, in Asia, and in Africa. Our successes were uniform 
because our measures were vigorous.' The French marine in- 
deed was ruined — they had not ten ships of the line fit for 
service — but there was Spain who had joined France, and 
there were Swedes, Genoese, Dutch, from whom France might 
hire ships. As to the desertion of the King of Prussia, it ' was 
insidious, tricking, base, and treacherous.' The Treaty had in 
it the seeds of future war. It restored the enemy to his former 
greatness. The gains were no equivalent to the surrender." 



vii.] FALL FROM POWER 141 

Such was the tremendous delenda est Carthago of the 
British Cato: a policy, clear, practicable, almost 
achieved, and which Pitt might have accomplished had 
circumstances permitted — for a time at least. 1 It was 
an appeal to systematise the exclusive trade monopolies 
in favour in that age. The fisheries of North America, 
the sugar, cotton, and products of the West Indies, the 
rich and varied trade of India, the slave markets of 
Africa, were all at our mercy. France and Spain had 
settlements in all four of these lands ; but the absolute 
mistress of the seas could tear them away, and could 
hold them against the world. Once having all the 
important transmarine colonies in her hands, she must, 
and she could, establish with them a strict monopoly 
of trade. The scheme was grand, or rather grandiose, 
as was everything of Pitt's. It was in strict accord 
with the economics of that age. Nor was it contrary 
to the morality of the age. It was not until fourteen 
years later that Adam Smith dispelled this dismal 
illusion, when he wrote : — 

"... To found a great empire for the sole purpose of rais- 
ing up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a 
project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, 
a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers ; but 
extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by 
shopkeepers. Such statesmen, and such statesmen only, are 
capable of fancying that they will find some advantage in em- 
ploying the blood and treasure of their fellow-citizens, to found 
and maintain such an empire." 

Pitt, alas ! was such a statesman. His was a govern- 

1 Captain Mahan has clearly shown that France lost India and 
Canada because she could not act at a distance by sea. And Britain 
lost her American Colonies from the same failure in 1781. 



142 CHATHAM [chap. vii. 

nient deeply influenced by the shopkeepers of London 
and Bristol. Fallacies die hard ! And even in our 
own day we have seen shopkeepers masquerading as 
statesmen, or statesmen cajoling the shopkeepers, who 
are willing to employ the blood and treasure of their 
fellow-citizens in founding an empire on the anti- 
quated sophism of patriotic trade under the national 
flag. 

Pitt's grand schemes were defeated by the thirst of 
power in the young King and the venal arts of Bute 
and Fox ; and it is well for us that they were defeated, 
vile as were the means and contemptible as were his 
rivals. The agony and exhaustion of the great orator 
were such that he left the House at once without 
voting, and was welcomed outside with a roar of 
applause. Three hundred and nineteen members voted 
for the Peace. Sixty-five, on the other side, said Wal- 
pole, " were not bribed" "Now," said the Princess of 
Wales, " my son is King of England." 



CHAPTEE VIII 

IN OPPOSITION 

The conduct of the " Great Commoner " after his dis- 
missal was what we now call non-benevolent neutrality. 
He made no attempt to form a party, to overturn the 
ministry, or to return to power. He was independent, 
critical, at times their friend, their candid protector, 
but always with a grand air of superior wisdom. Nor 
can we deny that he showed a superior wisdom, and a 
nature above that of the feeble and selfish jobbers who 
had displaced him. Bute was so intensely unpopular 
that he was not safe in the streets, and had not a 
friend outside his own creatures. The English public 
stormed at everything Scotch, and insulted every Scot. 
On his side Pitt abstained from attacking Bute, and 
publicly proclaimed his esteem for North Britain. 
When his brother-in-law and old colleague, George 
Grenville, deserted him, and was promoted to lead the 
House of Commons, Pitt bantered him with his con- 
tempt rather than crushed him with his indignation. 
When Pitt was invited to join a new ministry again, 
he showed no desire to do so. And even when the 
King in his bewilderment was willing to treat with 
his rejected servant, Pitt refused to have anything to 

143 



144 CHATHAM [chap. 

do with government, unless he could form a ministry 
on his own terms by his own choice. 

All this time Pitt was wont to treat his opponents 
with an air of amused contempt, and the House of 
Commons as a body to be rebuked rather than con- 
vinced. He was now the object of virulent abuse and 
savage lampoons, inspired and paid for by his rivals 
and the Court. He made no reply in public or in 
private. In the House, an Irish free-lance, Colonel 
Barre, instigated, says Walpole, by Bute and Fox, 
made a furious attack on Pitt, calling him " a pro- 
fligate minister, who had thrust himself into power on 
the shoulders of the mob." In the next debate, Barre 
renewed his philippic, and was openly supported by 
Fox. Pitt made no reply. " The indignation of the 
House," says Walpole, " showed that such savage war 
was detested." " Barre was abhorred as a barbarian 
irregular, and Fox, who had lent such kind assistance 
to a ruffian, drew the chief odium on himself." In the 
debate on the Peace, Pitt studiously avoided replying 
to Grenville. But when, on the Budget proposals, 
Grenville, in his languid, querulous tone, asked the 
opposition to tell him " where the money could be got," 
Pitt, mimicking his accent, repeated the words of a 
popular song — Gentle Shepherd, tell me ivhere ! Gren- 
ville was furious — but Pitt rose, bowed,' and went out. 
Grenville never lost the nickname of the " Gentle 
Shepherd." 

Bute soon proved himself to be incompetent, un- 
scrupulous, and shameless. When he called in Fox, 
with promise of a peerage, to pull the Peace through 
Parliament, he sanctioned the most monstrous system 



viii.] IN OPPOSITION 145 

of corruption and of intimidation ever known even 
in that century of bribery and outrage. He made a 
Chancellor of the Exchequer of Sir Erancis Dashwood, 
an ignorant debauehe, who had once been a Jacobite. 
When this besotted junto proposed an excise on cider, 
with a right of search, to be paid by the grower, the 
public wrath was as great as when Walpole almost 
ruined himself by his Bill for an Excise. Pitt again 
thundered against Excise in his old strain. "Every 
man's house was his castle." " Excise was odious and 
grievous to the dealer, but intolerable to the private 
person, whose house was to be invaded by the 
gaugers." Pitt might thunder, but he was powerless. 
Parliament voted the tax by overwhelming majorities. 
And Johnson, as we know, in his Dictionary defined 
Excise as "a hateful tax levied upon commodities and 
adjudged, not by the common judges of property, but 
wretches hired by those to whom excise was paid." 
Pitt was not the only man in the eighteenth century 
who used violent phrases. 

Violent language was now the order of the day, and 
no man used language so violent and coarse as the 
profligate and scurrilous wit, John Wilkes, member 
for Aylesbury, Colonel of the Bucks Militia, whose 
escapades were destined to throw into confusion for 
many long years, governments, parties, and the Court. 
Wilkes, a man ruined and infamous, but still popular 
in many brilliant circles, had founded the North Briton, 
wherein he criticised by name public persons with an 
audacity and insolence that were unknown even in 
that age. In Number 45, after exhausting the 
language of insult to the Scots and the Scottish 



146 CHATHAM [chap. 

minister, Wilkes attacked the King's speech, and 
lamented that the Sovereign's name should give 
sanction "to the most odious measures," "most un- 
justifiable doctrines," and "infamous fallacy," and so 
forth, in a strain in which ministers were often assailed 
in those days — and indeed in our own. Walpole said 
" nothing could be more just than the satire." The 
government committed the folly of seizing Wilkes, 
searching his house and papers, under a general (i.e. an 
open) warrant without name, and committed him to 
the Tower. The defeat of "general warrants" in 
the courts of law, the triumph of Wilkes, and the 
blundering illegalities committed by the ministers at 
the King's desire, form a memorable chapter in the 
history of Parliament and the doctrine of the Consti- 
tution, and need not be here rehearsed. 

When the matter came before Parliament, Pitt 
made an admirable speech, defending the great con- 
stitutional principles with weighty good sense, and 
lucidly expounding the legal grounds on which they 
rest. Backed as he was with gout, he said : — 

" The surrender of the privileges of a member was danger- 
ous to the freedom of Parliament, and an infringement on the 
rights of the people. It put every member who did not vote 
with the minister under a perpetual terror of imprisonment. 
If a member committed a crime, Parliament would not shield 
him; but Parliament had no right to vote away its privileges. 
The paper no doubt was a libel — he entirely agreed. He con- 
demned the whole series of the 'North Britons'; he called 
them illiberal, unmanly, and detestable. He abhorred all 
reflections of a nation. The King's subjects were one people. 
Whoever divided them was guilty of sedition. The author, 
it was true, was the blasphemer of his God, and the libeller of 
his King. The dignity and the honour of Parliament had 



vin.] IN OPPOSITION 147 

been called upon to support and protect the purity of his 
Majesty's character ; and this they had done, by a strong and 
decisive condemnation of the libel. But having done this, it 
was neither consistent with the honour and safety of Parlia- 
ment, nor with the rights and interests of the people, to 
go one step farther. The rest belonged to the Courts 
below." 

Wilkes escaped to France, and in the next year he 
was expelled from the House by what was afterwards 
admitted to be an act ultra vires. In the debate on the 
legality of " general warrants," Pitt again spoke with 
excellent sense and justice. He challenged ministers 
to defend the legality of such, warrants. To argue 
that they had been issued by other governments was 
no justification. It was true that two such warrants 
had been issued by himself. But they were not 
against libels. Both were for the seizure of foreigners 
about to leave the country. Both were issued in a 
time of war to apprehend enemies. He had been 
advised by the Attorney-General that the warrant was 
illegal, and that he must take the consequences. He 
deliberately faced the risk, and, for the public safety, 
he seized a suspicious foreigner who was in hiding. In 
the present case, there was no urgency or necessity. 
The safety of the state was in no danger. Parliament 
had voted away its own privilege and laid the personal 
freedom of every representative of the people at the 
mercy of the Attorney-General. The wanton exercise 
of an illegal power admits of no justification or even 
palliation. In the present case it is personal resent- 
ment against a particular person. If the House sup- 
ported these general warrants, they would be the 
disgrace of the present age and the reproach of 



148 CHATHAM [chap. 

posterity. All this is now the unquestioned law of the 
Constitution. 

In April 1763 Lord Bute astonished the world by- 
sudden resignation of office. He had obtained every- 
thing he could hope to gain, and he shrank from the 
difficulties and the hatred with which he was sur- 
rounded. He no doubt fully counted on retaining 
power as royal Favourite, even if he publicly withdrew 
from office. He was succeeded by George Grenville, 
who, with sterling qualities of honesty, courage, and 
industry, had a singular gift of annoying the King and 
of blundering into dangerous crises. The ministry of 
Grenville, however, was as unstable and as unpopular 
as that of Bute, whilst it showed no willingness to 
submit to the voice that whispered behind the throne. 
Before five months had passed, the Favourite sought an 
interview with Pitt himself and suggested his laying his 
views before the King. Next day Pitt was summoned 
to the King's closet. The interview was outrageously 
irregular and indecent. At the instigation of the late 
Prime Minister, who had resigned office five months 
previously, and unbeknown to the actual ministers for the 
time being, King George held a long private interview 
with the former Prime Minister, whom he himself had 
dismissed less than two years before. And this took 
place at Buckingham House, and not at Versailles or 
Potsdam. 

The King told Pitt that he thought his present 
ministers could not stand ; and he practically invited 
Pitt to suggest what ministry he would himself pro- 
pose in their place. Pitt discussed the question in 
great detail, and evidently proposed a coalition with 



viii.] IN OPPOSITION 149 

Newcastle, Devonshire, Rockingham, Temple, and 
Hardwicke. In the first interview, the King seemed 
inclined to accept the combination. But reflection 
soon opened his eyes, and probably those of the 
Favourite, that what Pitt intended was a strong 
government of which he should be the master spirit. 
The negotiation was at once broken off. The King 
was resolved to be master : and Pitt was resolved not 
to be a tool. Throughout the negotiation Pitt had 
treated the King with grand deference; but frankly 
told him with whom he would serve, and with whom 
he would not serve. The King on his part was 
obstinate and prejudiced for and against persons, and 
wanted to form Pitt's ministry himself. On the 
rupture, he went about in his garrulous, mischief- 
making, self-sufficient way, throwing the failure on 
Pitt, and publicly naming the men in whom Pitt had 
expressed want of confidence. The shrewd Chester- 
field as usual summed up the whole situation in a 
phrase — "the one asked too much, and the other 
would not yield enough." Neither Pitt, nor George, 
was much given to yield — the one because he was too 
great, the other because he was too little, to take 
counsel of any one out himself. 

Before we pass to the disasters and criminal blunders 
of the Grenville ministry, "the worst administration 
since the Revolution," as Macaulay says, and to the 
rickety ministry of the respectable Rockingham, who 
succeeded Grenville, it will be well to collect all the 
abortive attempts made to bring Pitt into office until 
he formed his second administration. The " cousin- 
hood" had long been broken up, and Lord Temple 



150 CHATHAM [chap. 

alone remained at Pitt's side. They also had begun 
to differ on many things, as about Wilkes. Without 
family influence, without a party, without regular 
followers in either house ; a Whig by principle, but 
not a sworn partisan of that faction; a believer in 
personal government and a sentimental royalist, but 
yet not a Tory ; a passionate stickler for the Constitu- 
tion as settled in 1689 and for the sacred right of 
popular representation — Pitt, by the ascendency of his 
genius and character, seemed to make every govern- 
ment from which he was excluded a temporary ex- 
pedient; and yet he had neither the desire nor the 
means to form a government of his own. 

The King soon began to hate George Grenville as 
minister even more than Pitt ; but after the failure of 
the negotiation with Pitt, he was forced to take Gren- 
ville back, with the Duke of Bedford as a sort of 
buffer. George then called in his uncle, the Duke of 
Cumberland, to his aid. The Duke made fresh over- 
tures to Pitt, actually going down to Hayes to see the 
invalid in his sick-room. Pitt was prepared to form a 
ministry, " if he could carry the constitution with himP By 
this he seems to have meant that the illegal doings 
and the proscriptions of Bute and Grenville should be 
reversed, the obnoxious taxes repealed, and no influ- 
ence behind the throne suffered to interfere. Temple 
and Pitt were told that the King would insist on 
certain nominations to office ; and thereupon, though 
Pitt seemed willing to yield, Temple peremptorily 
refused, and pursuaded Pitt to do the same. The 
great rupture between Pitt and Temple had not yet 
come. Their close alliance in family and in politics 



vin.] IN OPPOSITION 151 

had lasted for twenty years, and Temple was now the 
last remaining colleague that Pitt retained. Pitt, we 
are told, in his grand way, repeated the verses Anna 
uttered to Dido when she discovered the rash act : — 

"Exstinxti me teque, soror, populumque patresque 
Sidonios, urbemque tuam." 

It has been the fashion to condemn Pitt for refusing 
office on this occasion, and to ascribe it to his weakness 
in yielding his better judgment "to his evil genius, 
Temple/' This is not quite so clear. The motives 
that swayed the harassed mind of the tortured proud 
man in the retirement of his chamber are even now far 
from plain. But if Pitt had reason to believe that the 
King and Bute, with their confederates, were still 
strong enough to tie his hands, he may have been 
right in refusing to help. 

The King found Grenville intolerable, and struggled 
to discover a substitute to replace him. The great 
Whig nobles were hardly more tolerable, and one after 
another they caused a ministerial crisis by their un- 
popularity or by their exacting terms. No minister 
would satisfy King George, except one who would do 
the King's work by corruption or by illegalities. At 
each crisis he was forced to call back the capable and 
resolute man whom he personally hated. " I would 
sooner meet Mr. Grenville at the point of my sword 
than let him into my Cabinet," said George in his 
despair. The Duke of Bedford read the King a written 
lecture on his conduct so severe that George said if he 
had not broken out into a sweat he would have been 
suffocated with indignation. Again he got his uncle 
Cumberland to confer with Pitt. And again, we are 



152 CHATHAM [chap. 

told, Pitt refused at the instigation of " his evil genius/' 
Temple. At last, after endless negotiations, offers, and 
refusals, the Marquis of Eockingham, in July 1765, 
formed an administration. 

Lord Eockingham was a young, inexperienced, 
honest nonentity, of great position and blameless char- 
acter, who had nothing to recommend him but rank, 
his good intentions, and the genius of Edmund Burke, 
his private secretary and real leader. The ministry he 
got together with prolonged effort was mainly drawn 
from the Whig magnates, including the veteran jobber 
Newcastle, one or two honourable and competent men, 
Townshend, an erratic meteor, and some of the old 
Court gang. Eockingham made every effort to per- 
suade Pitt to join him ; he had visited him in his sick- 
room at Hayes ; he asked his advice before he made a 
plan ; he solicited his help on three separate occasions ; 
he invited Pitt's friends to take office. He seemed to 
offer Pitt not only office but the leadership of the whole 
party and government. 

All this Pitt declined. Lord Hardwicke said, Pitt 
would " neither lead nor be driven." Burke put down 
the failure " to the intractable temper of your friend 
Pitt," who was " lying on his back at Hayes talking 
fustian." Lord Chesterfield, as usual, exactly spoke 
the right word when he said the ministry was an arch 
in which the keystone was left out, and of course the 
keystone was Pitt. Both in his own day and in ours 
Pitt has been loudly condemned for not joining Lord 
Eockingham in the feeble and shortlived ministry of 
1765. Mr. Lecky tells us that this refusal, " if not the 
worst, was certainly the most disastrous incident of 



viii.] IN OPPOSITION 153 

Pitt's career." It is possible that the combination of 
Pitt, Burke, Conway, and the blameless Eockinghain, 
might have made an efficient government in time, if 
Pitt had been allowed to lead. But Burke in 1765 
had not spoken in Parliament ; Eockingham never 
became able to speak in it at all ; the old Newcastle, 
whom Pitt now utterly despised, was enrolled as a 
member of the new ministry ; and Bute, as Pitt feared, 
was still behind the throne. Lastly, Pitt himself was 
" lying on his back at Hayes," tortured with his fell 
disease and constantly a prey to nervous irritation. 
We do not know enough to condemn him for refusing 
to join a ministry in which were to be retained some 
of the worst elements that he most abhorred, and 
wherein he had good reason to fear that the 
creatures of the King would continue to hold a secret 
and malign influence. But even if we knew, more 
exactly than we do, all that acted on his mind, it 
would not be just to treat it as a crime, if a man, in 
the throes of disease and confined to a sick-room in 
his country house, shrank from undertaking a public 
task of tremendous difficulty in company with men, 
some of whom he regarded as frankly mischievous and 
all of whom he regarded as utterly his inferiors. The 
early years of George ni.'s reign were marked by a 
miserable succession of feeble and incoherent ministries. 
But the inner cause of all this confusion and failure 
was the perverse self-will and criminal ambition of 
George himself. 

It is possible that a powerful and stable government 
might have been ultimately formed by a loyal com- 
bination of Pitt, Eockingham^ Shelburne, Grafton, 



154 CHATHAM [chap. 

Conway, and Burke — always assuming the quiescence 
of George in. and of gout. But this is all the " great- 
might-have-been." In 1765 neither Pitt nor any one 
else could have known the powers of Edmund Burke, 
as we know them now. And they were at best those 
of a philosopher rather than of a statesman. But 
cabinet-making one hundred and forty years after the 
date is an even more futile amusement than cabinet- 
making by contemporaries in a crisis. The photo- 
graphic diaries of Walpole record at least six different 
occasions on which more or less formal negotiations 
were opened with Pitt, between 1762 and 1766, to 
induce him to form or to join a ministry. They prove 
at any rate that he was not eager to take office. We 
are in no position to determine that he failed in duty 
to his country by declining all these overtures. The 
better solution would seem to be that disease, with all 
its mental and moral reaction, had much to do with 
his conduct. And George in. was an obstacle even 
worse than the gout. Pitt perhaps wrote the truth 
when he said to Lord Shelburne (February 1766) that 
he would never owe his return to power " to any Court 
cabal or ministerial connection." All the dissolving 
ministries between 1761 and 1766 were patched up by 
one or other of these methods, and some of them by both. 
At last, in July 1766, Pitt was almost forced by 
the state of the political imbroglio to form a second 
administration. But before treating of it, it will be 
well to go back to the brief ministries of Grenville and 
Rockingham to show the difficulties to which Pitt 
succeeded. In March 1764 Grenville carried a resolu- 
tion to charge certain Stamp duties on the American 



viii.] IN OPPOSITION 155 

colonies. It was the beginning of a struggle which 
was destined to dominate British policy for a genera- 
tion, and indeed to affect for centuries the history of 
mankind. The Stamp Act of 1765 was calculated to 
raise £100,000, and it was proposed to expend it in 
contributing to the cost of the army needful to be kept 
in America. This, under the vastly enlarged area of 
the colonies, was taken to mean 20,000 men. The 
opposition on the other side of the Atlantic was at 
first not great. But in Parliament Conway and Barre 
raised objections. Pitt was absent from Parliament 
almost entirely during the year. He was laid up with 
recurrent attacks of gout from the time of his power- 
ful speech in condemnation of General Warrants. In 
his own day and since some doubt has been expressed 
as to the degree to which at this period Pitt was 
incapacitated by his malady. A few facts about it 
may be here collected. 

In January 1764 Charles, the heir of the Duke of 
Brunswick, desiring to pay a compliment and to visit 
the statesman, took the unusual course of going down 
to see him in the country, as he learned that there 
was no prospect of Pitt being able to be carried to 
town. In February 1765, Pitt writes to the secretary 
of the Duke that his gout had kept him in bed and 
prevented him from holding a pen. In November 
1765 he goes again to Bath, and tells his wife that 
" the foot is much swelled, the hand less weak." " He 
can now hold a pen." " He can stand with the help 
of crutches." "He can hold a fork at dinner and 
can write legibly." In December, he can " crawl to 
the pump." In January 1766, if he can crawl or be 



156 CHATHAM [chap. 

carried to town, he will " deliver his mind and heart 
on the state of America. " In the midst of the debate 
on the Stamp Act, he tells his wife that he is better 
except in one leg. He hopes " to be able to remain 
through the debate." In May 1766, he has to go to 
Bath again; and tells his wife "he had borne the 
journey well." 

He was in the west country when, 7th July 1766, 
he received the King's command to travel up to 
Court to consult him as to a new ministry, as soon as 
he was strong enough. It was not till 12th July that 
he arrived in London, and tells his wife — u I got safe 
to town, not over well, having found the fatigue of the 
first day too much for me." On 17th July he tells 
his wife that he has some fever hanging on him, and 
a long and painful interview with his brother-in-law, 
Temple, had raised his pulse. On 19th July he trusts 
to be able next week to attend the King without risk. 
At last, 22nd July 1766, the King writes: "Mr. 
Pitt, I am glad you find yourself so much recovered as 
to be able to come to me to-morrow." Such was the 
physical state of the man whom George in. now 
summoned to direct his disordered affairs in his vast 
dominions. It was hoped that he would be strong 
enough to bear a journey of a mile or two to meet his 
sovereign. The life of Pitt cannot be understood at 
all unless we fully comprehend the constant prostra- 
tion of body and mind which afflicted him throughout 
his career, and amply explains much in his conduct. 
Hardly any famous man of action in history has been 
so heavily and so continuously disabled by physical 
and mental disorder. 



vin.] IN OPPOSITION 157 

A man so delicate and irritable would naturally often 
change his residence ; and accordingly we find Pitt in 
many different houses, and at no period of his life 
more than at this time. During his term of office 
of Paymaster, 1746-1755, he lived much at the Pay 
Office at Whitehall, and was there the first year of his 
marriage. He also had a house at Enfield in Middle- 
sex, making frequent visits to Lord Temple at Stowe, 
and to the Grenvilles at Wotton. For the first six 
months of 1754, the year of his marriage, he was at 
Bath, taking the waters and very lame. 

He told Grenville as early as 1749, that he had 
" almost experience enough of the Bath waters to be a 
physician with regard to them." He passed much pf 
his life at various medicinal springs, and was at Bath 
again in 1755. In the spring of 1756 he is estab- 
lished at Hayes, a property which he bought soon 
after his marriage. 

Hayes Place in Kent stands on a salubrious and 
well-wooded hill, about twelve miles from London, 
and a few miles south of Bromley. He built there 
a comfortable country house of no great pretensions, 
then standing close to a quiet village, having orna- 
mental grounds, plantations, and pleasant views. Pitt 
gradually enlarged the place and carried on his 
favourite amusement of landscape gardening, planting 
shrubs and trees with the same passionate energy that 
he threw into everything he touched. He loved the 
spot, and his letters show the affection for it that he 
retained through life. In 1766, being then settled at 
Burton Pynsent, he sold Hayes Place to Thomas 
Walpole, nephew of the statesman, who at once made 



158 CHATHAM [chap. 

alterations in the house, which he greatly enjoyed. 
But within a year Lady Chatham and Lord Camden 
induced Mr. Walpole to sell back the place, which was 
thought to be indispensable for restoring Pitt's ruined 
health and disordered mind. 

During his own ministry Pitt had lived in St. 
James Square (No. 10), the house occupied for a season 
by Mr. Gladstone in 1890. When he resigned office 
in 1761, he resided at Hayes ; but in 1766 and 1767 
he took Northend House at Hampstead, the air of 
which, he thought, would suit his complaint. In 1765 
Sir William Pynsent, a baronet of Somersetshire, said 
to be nearly ninety years old, and known to be eccen- 
tric and an ardent opponent of the government, 
devised to him the fine estate of Burton Pynsent, 
which was said to be of the value of £3000 a year, 
together with £30,000 in money, according to Wal- 
pole. Sir William Pynsent was personally unknown 
to Pitt, and the gift was entirely due to the donor's 
admiration of the statesman's services to his country. 
During his second ministry Pitt occupied for a time 
the mansion of the Duke of Grafton in Bond Street. 
But he soon retreated to the country, and after his 
resignation he continued to reside for the most part 
at his beloved Hayes Place. It was thither that he 
was carried after his seizure to his death-bed. 

It may be taken as almost certain that, if Pitt had 
been in his place and in full possession of his powers, 
the disastrous policy of taxing the American colonies 
could not have been carried. But during the whole 
of the debates on Grenville's Stamp Act of 1765, Pitt 
was away at Bath, and disabled by gout. When 



vni.] IN OPPOSITION 159 

Lord Rockingham succeeded Grenville, one of his first 
and most beneficial measures was the Repeal of the 
Stamp Act, in 1766, and this was very largely due to 
the influence and eloquence of Pitt. Up to the be- 
ginning of the year 1766 Pitt remained in retirement 
at Bath. From there he wrote to Lord Shelburne 
protesting against " the making good by force there, 
preposterous and infatuated errors in policy here." 
In January 1766 he returned to the House of 
Commons after a long absence, with powers materially 
restored. The King's Speech turned on the disturbed 
state of the American colonies, where riots and 
violent opposition made the Stamp Act wholly un- 
workable. In fact, the American revolution was on 
the point of breaking out eight years earlier than it 
did. In the debates which brought about the Eepeal 
of the Stamp Act, Pitt had a leading part. As these 
speeches are amongst the most authentic reports we 
possess, and as they contain many of his noblest 
utterances, it may be well to quote them at large : — 

" Sir, I came to town but to-day. I was a stranger to the 
tenor of his Majesty's speech and the proposed address, till I 
heard them read in this House. Unconnected and uncon- 
sulted, I have not the means of information ; I am fearful of 
offending through mistake, and therefore beg to be indulged 
with a second reading of the proposed address." The address 
being read, Mr. Pitt went on : — " He commended the King's 
speech, approved of the address in answer as it decided 
nothing, every gentleman being left at perfect liberty to take 
such a part concerning America as he might afterwards see 
fit. One word only he could not approve of ; ' an early ' is a 
word that does not belong to the notice the ministry have 
given to Parliament of the troubles in America. In a matter 
of such importance, the communication ought to have been 



160 CHATHAM [chap. 

immediate : I speak not with respect to parties. I stand up in 
this place single and unconnected. As to the late ministry 
(turning himself to Mr. Grenville, who sat within one of him), 
every capital measure they took was — entirely wrong ! 

" As to the present gentlemen, those, at least, whom I 
have in my eye — (looking at the bench on which Mr. 
Conway sat with the Lords of the Treasury) — I have no 
objection; I have never been made a sacrifice by any of 
them. Their characters are fair ; and I am always glad when 
men of fair character engage in his Majesty's service. Some 
of them have done me the honour to ask my poor opinion 
before they would engage. These will do me the justice to 
own, I advised them to engage, but notwithstanding — for I 
love to be explicit — I cannot give them my confidence ; pardon 
me, gentlemen (bowing to the Ministry), confidence is a plant 
of slow growth in an aged bosom, youth is the season of 
credulity ; by comparing events with each other, reasoning 
from effects to causes, methinks I plainly discover the traces 
of an overruling influence. 

" There is a clause in the Act of Settlement obliging every 
Minister to sign his name to the advice which he gives his 
Sovereign. Would it were observed ! I have had the honour 
to serve the Crown, and if I could have submitted to influence 
I might still have continued to serve ; but I would not be 
responsible for others. I have no local attachments. It is 
indifferent to me whether a man was rocked in his cradle on 
this or that side of the Tweed. I sought for merit wherever it 
was to be found. It it my boast, that I was the first minister 
who looked for it, and found it in the mountains of the North. 
I called it forth, and drew into your service a hardy and 
intrepid race of men ; men who, when by your jealousy they 
became a prey to the artifices of your enemies, had gone nigh 
to overturn the State in the war of 1745. These men, in the 
last war, were brought to combat on your side ; they served 
with fidelity, as they fought with valour, and conquered for 
you in every part of the world ; detested be the national reflec- 
tions against them! they are unjust, groundless, illiberal, 
unmanly. When I ceased to serve his Majesty as a Minister, 
it was not the country but the man by which I was moved. 



viii.] IN OPPOSITION 161 

The man of that country [Bute] wanted wisdom, and held 
principles incompatible with freedom. 

" It is a long time, Mr. Speaker, since I have attended in 
Parliament. When the resolution was taken in this House to 
tax America, I was ill in bed. If I could have endured to have 
been carried in my bed, so great was the agitation of my mind 
for the consequences, I would have solicited some kind hand to 
have laid me down on this floor, to have borne my testimony 
against it ! It is now an Act that has passed. I would speak 
with decency of every Act of this House, but I must beg the 
indulgence of the House to speak of it with freedom. 

" I hope the day may soon be appointed to consider the state 
of the nation with respect to America — I hope gentlemen will 
come to this debate with all the temper and impartiality that 
his Majesty recommends, and the importance of the subject 
requires. A subject of greater importance than ever engaged the 
attention of this House ! that subject only excepted, when, near 
a century ago, it was the question whether you yourselves 
were to be bond or free. In the mean time, as I cannot depend 
upon health for any future day, such is the nature of my 
infirmities, I will beg to say a few words at present, leaving 
the justice, the equity, the policy, the expediency of the Act 
to another time. I will only speak to one point, a point which 
seems not to have been generally understood — I mean as to the 
right to tax. Some gentlemen seem to have considered it as a 
point of honour. If gentlemen consider it in that light, they 
leave all measures of right and wrong to follow a delusion 
that may lead to destruction. It is my opinion, that this King- 
dom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. At the same 
time I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies 
to be sovereign and supreme in every circumstance of govern- 
ment and legislation whatsoever. The colonists are the sub- 
jects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all 
the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of 
Englishmen : equally bound by its laws, and equally partici- 
pating in the constitution of this free country. The Americans 
are the sons, not the bastards, of England. Taxation is no 
part of the governing or legislative power. The taxes are the 
voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. In legislation 



162 CHATHAM [chap. 

the three estates of the realm are alike concerned, but the con- 
currence of the Peers and the Crown to a tax is only necessary 
to clothe it with the form of a law. The gift and grant is of 
the Commons alone. In ancient days, the Crown, the Barons, 
and the Clergy possessed the lands. In those days, the Barons 
and the Clergy gave and granted to the Crown. They 
gave and granted what was their own. At present, since the 
discovery of America, and other circumstances permitting, 
the Commons are become the proprietors of the land. The 
Church (God bless it !) has but a pittance. The property of 
the Lords, compared with that of the Commons, is as a drop of 
water in the ocean : and this House represents those Commons, 
the proprietors of the lands, and those proprietors virtually 
represent the rest of the inhabitants. When, therefore, in 
this House, we give and grant, we give and grant what is our 
own. But in an American tax, what do we do ? We, your 
Majesty's Commons for Great Britain, give and grant to your 
Majesty — what ? Our own property ? — No ! We give and 
grant to your Majesty, the property of your Majesty's Com- 
mons of America. It is an absurdity in terms. 

" The distinction between legislation and taxation is essentially 
necessary to liberty. The Crown, the Peers, are equally legis- 
lative powers with the Commons. If taxation be a part of 
simple legislation, the Crown and the Peers would have rights 
in taxation as well as yourselves; rights which they claim, 
which they will exercise, whenever the principle can be sup- 
ported by power. 

" There is an idea in some, that the colonies are virtually 
represented in this House. I would fain know by whom an 
American is represented here. Is he represented by any 
knight of the shire, in any county of this kingdom ? Would 
to God that respectable representation were augmented to a 
greater number ! Or will you tell him that he is represented 
by any representative of a borough ? — a borough which perhaps 
its own representatives never saw. This is what is called the 
rotten part of the constitution. It cannot continue a century. If 
it does not drop, it must be amputated. The idea of a virtual 
representation of America in this House is the most contempt- 
ible that ever entered into the head of man : it does not 
deserve a serious refutation. 



viii.] IN OPPOSITION 163 

" The Commoners of America, represented in their several 
assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this 
their constitutional right, of giving and granting their own 
money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed 
it. At the same time this Kingdom, as the supreme govern- 
ing and legislative power, has always bound the colonies by 
her laws, by her regulations and restrictions in trade, in 
navigation, in manufactures — in everything except that of 
taking their money out of their pockets without their consent. 

" Here I would draw the line, 

11 ■ Qaam ultra citraque nequit consistere rectumS " 

Pitt was answered by Grenville. In his reply, he 
said : — 

" Gentlemen have been charged with giving birth to sedition 
in America. Several have spoken their sentiments with free- 
dom against this unhappy Act, and that freedom has become 
their crime. Sorry I am to hear the liberty of speech in this 
House imputed as a crime. But the imputation shall not dis- 
courage me. It is a liberty I mean to exercise. No gentle- 
man ought to be afraid to exercise it. It is a liberty by which 
the gentleman who calumniates it might have profited. He 
ought to have profited. He ought to have desisted from his 
project. The gentleman tells us America is obstinate ; 
America is almost in open rebellion. / rejoice that. America 
has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings 
of liberty, as voluntarily to let themselves be made slaves, would 
have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest. I come 
not here armed at all points with law cases and Acts of Parlia- 
ment, with the statute-book doubled down in dogs '-ears, to 
defend the cause of liberty : if I had, I myself would have 
cited the two cases of Chester and Durham. I would have 
cited them to show that, even under arbitrary reigns, Parlia- 
ments were ashamed of taxing a people without their consent, 
and allowed them representatives. Why did the gentleman 
confine himself to Chester and Durham ? he might have taken 
a higher example in Wales — Wales, that never was taxed by 
Parliament until it was incorporated. I would not debate a 
particular point of law with the gentleman : I know his 



164 CHATHAM [chap. 

abilities. I have been obliged to his diligent researches. But, 
for the defence of liberty, upon a general principle, upon a 
constitutional principle, it is a ground on which I stand firm ; 
on which I dare meet any man. The gentleman tells us of 
many who are taxed and are not represented — the India Com- 
pany, merchants, stockholders, manufacturers. Surely many 
of these are represented in other capacities, as owners of land, 
or as freemen of boroughs. It is a misfortune that more are not 
actually represented. But they are all inhabitants of this 
kingdom, and, as such, are they not virtually represented? 
Many have it in their option to be actually represented. They 
have connections with those that elect, and they have influence 
over them. The gentleman mentioned the stockholders : I 
hope he does not reckon the debts of the nation as a part of 
the national estate. Since the accession of King William, 
many ministers, some of great, others of moderate abilities, 
have taken the lead of government. 

u None of these thought, or even dreamed, of robbing the 
colonies of their constitutional rights. That was reserved to 
mark the era of the late administration; not that there were 
wanting some, when I had the honour to serve his Majesty, 
to propose to me to burn my fingers with an American Stamp 
Act. With the enemy at their back, with our bayonets at 
their breasts in the day of their distress, perhaps the Americans 
would have submitted to the imposition ; but it would have 
been taking an ungenerous and unjust advantage. The gentle- 
man boasts of his bounties to America ! Are not those bounties 
intended finally for the benefit of this kingdom? If they are 
not, he has misapplied the national treasures. I am no courtier 
of America — I stand up for this kingdom. I maintain that 
the Parliament has a right to bind, to restrain America. Our 
legislative power over the colonies is sovereign and supreme. 
When it ceases to be sovereign and supreme, I would advise 
every gentleman to sell his land, if he can, and embark for 
that country. When two countries are connected like England 
and her colonies, without being incorporated, the one must 
necessarily govern ; the greater must rule the less ; but so rule 
it, as not to contradict the fundamental principles that are 
common to both. 



vin.] IN OPPOSITION 165 

"If the gentleman does not understand the difference 
between internal and external taxes, I cannot help it ; but 
there is a plain distinction between taxes levied for the pur- 
poses of raising a revenue, and duties imposed for the regula- 
tion of trade, for the accommodation of the subject ; although 
in the consequences some revenue might incidentally arise 
from the latter. 

" The gentleman asks, When were the colonies emancipated? 
I desire to know when they were made slaves ? But I dwell 
not upon words. When I had the honour of serving his 
Majesty, I availed myself of the means of information which 
I derived from my office : I speak, therefore, from knowledge. 
My materials were good ; I was at pains to collect, to digest, 
to consider them ; and I will be bold to affirm that the profits 
of Great Britain from the trade of the colonies, through all its 
branches, are two millions a year. This is the fund that carried 
you triumphantly through the last war. The estates that were 
rented at two thousand pounds a year, threescore years ago, 
are at three thousand pounds at present. Those estates sold 
then for from fifteen to eighteen years' purchase; the same 
may now be sold for thirty. You owe this to America. This 
is the price America pays for her protection. And shall a mis- 
erable financier come with a boast, that he can fetch a peppercorn 
into the Exchequer, by the loss of millions to the nation! I dare 
not say how much higher these profits may be augmented. 
Omitting the immense increase of people.by natural population, 
in the northern colonies, and the emigration from every part 
of Europe, I am convinced that the whole commercial system 
of America maybe altered to advantage. You have prohibited 
where you ought to have encouraged ; andyou have encouraged 
where you ought to have prohibited. Improper restraints have 
been laid on the continent in favour of these islands. You have 
but two nations to trade with in America. Would you had 
twenty ! Let Acts of Parliament in consequence of treaties 
remain, but let not an English minister become acustom-house 
officer for Spain, or for any foreign power. Much is wrong — 
much may be amended for the general good of the whole. 

" Does the gentleman complain that he has been misrepre- 
sented in the public prints ? It is a common misfortune. In 



1G6 CHATHAM [chap. 

the Spanish affair of last war, I was abused in all the news- 
papers for having advised his Majesty to violate the Law of 
Nations with regard to Spain. The abuse was industriously 
circulated even in handbills., If your administration did not 
propagate the abuse, the administration never contradicted it. 
I will not say what advice I did give to the King. My advice 
is in writing signed by myself, in the possession of the Crown. 
But I will say what advice I did not give to the King. I did 
not advise him to violate any of the Laws of Nations. 

" The gentleman must not wonder that he was not contra- 
dicted when, as the minister, he asserted the right of Parlia- 
ment to tax America. I know not how it is, but there is a 
modesty in this House which does not choose to contradict 
a minister. Even that chair, Mr. Speaker, sometimes looks 
towards St. James's. I wish gentlemen would get the better 
of this modesty. If they do not, perhaps the collective body 
may begin to abate of its respect for the representative. 

" A great deal has been said without doors of the power, of 
the strength, of America. It is a topic that ought to be 
cautiously meddled with. In a good cause, on a sound bottom, 
the force of this country can crush America to atoms. I know 
the valour of your troops ; I know the skill of your officers. 
There is not a company of foot that has served in America, out 
of which you may not pick a man of sufficient knowledge and 
experience to make a governor of a colony there. But on this 
ground — on the Stamp Act — when so many here will think 
it is a crying injustice, I am one who will lift up my hands 
against it. 

" In such a cause even your success would be hazardous. 
America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man Samson. She 
would embrace the pillars of the State, and pull down the consti- 
tution along with her. Is this your boasted Peace? To sheathe 
the sword, not in its scabbard, but in the bowels of your 
countrymen ? Will you quarrel with yourselves, now that the 
whole House of Bourbon is united against you ? While France 
disturbs your fisheries in Newfoundland, embarrasses your 
slave-trade to Africa, and withholds from your subjects in 
Canada their property stipulated by treaty ; while the stipu- 
lated ransom for the Manilas is refused by Spain, and its 



vin.] IN OPPOSITION 167 

gallant conqueror basely traduced into a mean plunderer — a 
gentleman whose noble and generous spirit would do honour 
to the proudest grandee of the country. The Americans have 
not acted in all things with prudence and temper. The 
Americans have been wronged. They have been driven to 
madness by injustice. Will you punish them for the madness 
which you have occasioned ? Rather let prudence and temper 
come first from this side. I will undertake for America that 
she will follow the example. There are two lines in a ballad 
of Prior's, of a man's behaviour to his wife, so applicable to 
you and your colonies, that I cannot help repeating them : — 

" * Be to her faults a little blind ; 
Be to her virtues very kind.' 

"Upon the whole, I will beg leave to tell the House 
what is really my opinion. It is, that the Stamp Act be 
repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately. That the reason 
for the repeal be assigned, because it was founded on an 
erroneous principle. At the same time, let the sovereign 
authority of this country over the colonies be asserted in as 
strong terms as can be devised, and be made to extend to 
every point of legislation whatsoever. We may bind their 
trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power 
whatsoever, except that of taking their money out of their 
pockets without their consent." 

The motion for an address was carried without a 
division. On the 26th of February a bill to repeal the 
Stamp Act was introduced, and received the Eoyal 
assent on the 18th of March. Together with the bill 
to repeal the Stamp Act was introduced another, called 
the Declaratory Act, asserting the undoubted power 
and authority of the King, with the consent of the 
Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, to make 
laws of sufficient force to bind the colonies and people 
of America in all cases whatsoever. This bill also 
received the Royal assent on the 18th of March. 



168 CHATHAM [chap. viii. 

This was the first of the great efforts of Pitt to 
spare his country and the world the evils of the great 
struggle with the Colonies. The long and vain appeal 
was to be closed only with his dying speech. But 
Americans were more ready than his countrymen at 
home to recognise all they owed him. The Commons 
House of South Carolina unanimously voted to Pitt 
a colossal statue in Charleston, " in grateful memory 
of his services to America " ; " for defending the free- 
dom of Americans, the true sons of England, by pro- 
moting a Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766." And the 
inscription ran : — " Time shall sooner destroy this 
mark of their esteem than erase from their minds the 
just sense of his patriotic virtue." 

It stands there still, it seems, after all that has 
passed since that date. " The right arm was broken off 
by a British cannon shot in 1780." Such are the ironies 
of the whirligig of Time. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 

That second term of responsible office has a fatal and 
melancholy record. " The Great Commoner " became 
Earl of Chatham ; he was forced to frame a ministry 
by inevitable pressure of events and the command of 
the King ; whilst disease of body and mind made him 
powerless, and at last quite irresponsible — ending in 
mere impotence and the wreck of a great career. He 
was "lost in quicksands/' says Carlyle — "suffering 
from gout, from semi-insanity." Macaulay attributes 
his failures to " his distempered state of mind " ; and 
to the " derangement of his faculties " being complete 
towards the close of his public service. His enthusi- 
astic eulogist mildly describes this as " the least sat- 
isfactory part of his history." Indeed it was. The 
Chatham Ministry is the strange and pathetic story of 
a Prime Minister continuing in office during two years, 
though disabled by the state of his mind, not only 
from directing the policy of his government, but even 
from seeing his colleagues or knowing what they were 
doing, whilst an obstinate King and his bewildered 
servants prepared ruin for the country under the shield 
of a great name. 

169 



170 CHATHAM [chap. 

The ascendency of Pitt over the minds of politicians 
and of the public was so great, even whilst he was lying 
in his sick-room at Bath, that every administration 
which had not his support, or at least his name, was 
regarded as a stop-gap. As each of them fell to pieces 
from internal dissension and their own blunders, the 
word in public places and in the King's closet had 
always been, " send for Pitt." By a singular but intel- 
ligible coincidence, George, who five years ago was eager 
to rid himself of Pitt and dreaded him as a tribune of 
the people, was now as eager to call him to office. Pitt 
and the King had now the same constitutional aim, 
different as were the methods they intended to use and 
the ultimate purpose to be served. It was a large aim : 
in many ways a necessary and salutary aim : an aim 
which in effect was practically achieved, even in the 
lifetime of Pitt and of the King. It was nothing less 
than the closing the era of government by Magnates. 

Prom the time of William in., government had been 
in the hands of aristocratic groups, "controlling," as 
the modern phrase has it, parliamentary influence by 
means of corruption, patronage, and wealth. The 
force and sagacity of Walpole had displaced this for 
a time; and the genius and popularity of Pitt had 
shaken it off for a second time. But for six years 
George in. had found himself in the grip of the great 
Houses. Their groups were known as their "con- 
nection " — Pitt often called them the " factions." He 
avowed it as his purpose "to get rid of faction." 
There was a " Pelham faction," a " Bute faction," a 
" Grenville faction," a " Bockingham faction," a " Bed- 
ford faction." And there was Pitt. 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 171 

George had desired to get free from Pitt in 1761 
because Pitt was too masterful, too popular, and 
George was bent on being a real King himself. But 
Pitt was now a very different man, both morally and 
physically, from what he had been in the years of 
Quebec and Quiberon Bay. George now felt that he 
could safely use him, that he was the one man living 
who could break the reign of the Houses and their 
" connections." George had not the coarseness of his 
grandfather; he had plenty of bonhomie; and in 
tactical intrigue he was a match for any man of his 
time. His personal treatment of Pitt was, and always 
remained, gracious, kind, and conciliatory. Pitt, with 
his magnanimous nature and idealist brain, was over- 
whelmed by the King's condescension. He overrated 
his own powers, and above all his influence over men. 
He again believed that " he could save the country, 
and that no one else could." His idea was to put an 
end to government by " connections " ; to replace it 
by government by competent men, chosen without 
regard to party group or family, supported by the 
King's confidence and that of the representatives of 
the people. 

It was a fine ideal which in a measure has been 
realised from time to time ever since Pitt's son came 
into power. George of course intended to be King 
himself, when Pitt should have freed him from the 
confederated Houses. Pitt on his side intended to 
be master, borrowing the magical authority of the 
Crown, and counting to regain his old ascendency 
with the public. If George had been Victoria, if 
Pitt had possessed the vitality of Palmerston or 



172 CHATHAM [chap. 

Gladstone, this might have been the result. But 
George was an artful, obstinate bigot. Pitt was a 
physical wreck, hastening to mental impotence. Both 
George and Pitt soon found that the lordly Houses 
were not to be broken so easily. Both had to appeal 
to them, first to one and then to another. Chatham 
found that the House of Lords neither followed him 
nor feared him ; that, when he had quitted it, the 
House of Commons became a field for small intrigues 
and restless ambitions. And so the Chatham ministry, 
after making some well-intentioned attempts at reform, 
ended in confusion, and left behind it the seeds of 
fatal mischief. 

The new ministry was formed, after laborious 
negotiations and personal jealousies which we may 
now ignore, out of heterogeneous and almost dis- 
cordant elements, taken from different parties and even 
representing opposing policies. There were some men 
of ability, character, and great position, like the young 
Duke of Grafton and the young Earl of Shelburne. 
Pratt, now Lord Camden, was an able and upright 
Chancellor. The honourable General Conway was 
drawn off from the Rockingham " connection " ; but 
Edmund Burke refused to leave it. The brilliant and 
unscruplous Charles Townshend was made Chancellor 
of the Exchequer and Leader of the Commons ; Lord 
North was Paymaster; and Lord Granby was Com- 
mander-in-Chief. The " King's friends " held most of 
the minor places. Some members of the government 
were relicts of the older groups; some differed in 
principle from each other and from their chief. None 
of them had much experience of affairs, or any political 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 173 

weight. And the House of Commons was placed in 
the control of a reckless rhetorician. Not only was 
the " Cousinhood " now hopelessly broken, but what 
remained of it was vehemently hostile to Pitt. George 
Grenville had become his ablest opponent; Lord 
Temple was reconciled to his brother George, and, 
with Lyttelton, was in open revolt against his brother- 
in-law. Pitt pressed on Temple the office of Treasurer, 
but would not allow him to come in as a sort of Joint 
Prime Minister. Thereupon the vain Temple went 
into bitter opposition. 

Pitt had grossly miscalculated his own forces when 
he undertook to frame a government. He strangely 
underrated the secret powers of the Magnates. And 
he loftily despised the petty jealousies, vanities, and 
ambitions of the office-seekers and title-hunters around 
him. His clear-headed friend, Grafton, said — "his 
views were great and noble, worthy of a patriot ; but 
they were too visionary." It was not the age of 
Fabii, Publicolas, and Scipios, but of Newcastle, 
Townshend, Henry Pox, and Lord Temple. When 
Pitt went to call on Lord Eockingham, that great 
personage curtly refused to see him. Temple hired 
satirists to lampoon his brother-in-law ; and Edmund 
Burke now conceived a vehement prejudice against 
the man who succeeded, and, as he thought, had dis- 
placed his own patron, Eockingham. 

But more disastrous than the choice of men of 
different principles or of no principles, was the fatal 
mistake of transforming the " Great Commoner" into 
the Earl of Chatham. It was done without the 
knowledge of his colleagues, causing them dismay, 



174 CHATHAM [chap. 

and rousing the public to indignation. The illumina- 
tions were countermanded ; the new Bridge was not 
to bear his name. The City, it was said, "had 
brought in a virdict of felo de se" It is probable 
that if he had attempted to form his ministry as 
Lord Chatham, and not as Mr. Pitt, it would never 
have been formed at all. The amazement of the 
public, the rage of his party-followers in the City, 
was unreasonable and ignorant. In his day — and 
ever since, as in our day — a peerage was regarded as 
the natural reward of long official service. Peel and 
Gladstone are the only examples of Prime Ministers 
who, at the end of their careers, have rejected the 
honour on principle. William Pitt and Canning died 
in office quite young ; Melbourne and Palmerston 
were Peers. Walpole, Pulteney, Addington, Russell, 
Disraeli, all retired late in life to the Upper House. 
It was a silly clamour that would have it that Pitt 
had "betrayed the people/' or had taken a title 
as a bribe to change his principles. His whole 
after life was a reply to such gross and stupid 
calumny. 

The reason of the step is plain. Pitt took office at 
the urgent and long-continued demand of the King, 
full of great things to be done, and fondly believing 
himself strong enough to do them. He grossly over- 
rated his moral ascendency. He perhaps overrated 
his physical powers. But he was quite aware that 
to remain Leader in the Commons, or even to under- 
take any laborious department, would be his death. 
He accordingly took the Privy Seal, a sinecure office, 
which usually was held by a Peer. In his eyes, 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 175 

retirement to the Upper House was an essential 
condition of his forming a government. His ruined 
health was the dominant motive. But Pitt, with his 
superstition about the " grand manner/' could see no 
reason why he should not be created an Earl, any 
more than Lord John Russell did when he left the 
Commons as a political compromise. And it would 
be monstrous injustice to suggest that either states- 
man forfeited a single principle or forsook any political 
following when, towards the close of their lives, they 
sought the solemn peace of the Gilded Chamber. 

None the less, the acceptance of the Earldom of 
Chatham shook Pitt's ascendency to the root, and 
doomed his second ministry to failure. Though it 
was in no sense unworthy of him, nor did it at all 
impair his independence, though in many ways it gave 
him new wisdom and dignity of bearing, it was a 
political disaster. It was remembered how Walpole, 
the Earl of Orford, met in the House of Lords 
Pulteney, the Earl of Bath, saying, " Here are we, my 
Lord, the two most insignificant fellows in England." 
The transfer from the Commons to the Peers was 
made not at the end of a ministry, but whilst re- 
maining Prime Minister, as was the case with the 
Earldom of Disraeli. It may have been inevitable. 
It shows in him a curious naivete of spirit, or it may be 
an innocent ignorance of the average mind, to have 
overlooked the consequences of the step. But, if it 
was inevitable that Pitt should become Lord Chatham 
— and in some ways perhaps this was a gain to him, 
a gain to the country, — it would have been better that 
he should not have formed a Chatham Ministry. 



176 CHATHAM [chap. 

The three keenest observers of that age saw the 
weakness of the position. Horace Walpole wrote — 
"That fatal title blasted all the affection which his 
country had borne to him, and which he had deserved 
so well." " Lord Chatham's authority ceased with his 
popularity ; and his godhead, when he had affronted 
his priests." Of the new ministry Walpole wrote with 
that acute sight and pungent pen which tells us more 
than Burke's effervescent rhetoric. "The plan will 
probably be to pick and cull from all quarters, and 
break all parties as much as possible. From this 
moment I date the wane of Mr. Pitt's glory ; he will 
want the thorough-bass of drums and trumpets, and is 
not made for peace." One very bad sign for Lord 
Chatham is this, wrote Chesterfield, " all his enemies 
rejoice and all his friends are stupefied and dumb- 
founded." " He had fallen upstairs, and would never 
stand on his own legs again." What could account 
for " his going into that Hospital of Incurables " ? That 
keen onlooker saw clearly that the opposition in the 
Commons would prevail, when there was no Pitt to 
control them. Edmund Burke in a famous passage, 
more than ordinarily florid and fanciful, described how 
Lord Chatham " made an administration so chequered 
and speckled; he put together a piece of joinery 
so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed; a 
Cabinet so variously inlaid ; such a piece of diversified 
mosaic ; such a tessellated pavement without cement, 
here a bit of black stone and there a bit of white ; 
patriots and courtiers ; King's friends and Eepublicans ; 
Whigs and Tories ; treacherous friends and open 
enemies, that it was indeed a very curious show, 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 177 

but utterly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand 
on." x 

It was disastrous too that the season of 1766 was 
the worst on record ; the harvest was miserable ; riots 
ensued, and the public effervescence was at its height. 
Upon this the new ministers laid an embargo on the 
export of corn, and forbade the distilling of wheat. 
This, as they knew, was illegal and required confirma- 
tion by Parliament. Chatham boldly defended this 
arbitrary act on the ground of necessity and the needs 
of the public. It was his first appearance in the 
House of Lords. He spoke with modesty, good sense, 
and sound law, grounding his defence on the doctrines 
of Locke. The embargo, he said, was an act of power, 
extra vires — but justified by necessity. The opposition 
in both Houses was bitter and prolonged. Temple, 
Lyttelton, Mansfield, the Duke of Bedford, led it in 
the Lords ; George Grenville, Burke, Wedderburn 
in the Commons. When the Bill of Indemnity was 
sent up to the Lords from the Commons, Chatham 
spoke again, and with more vehemence. He said, 

1 Here we have Burke in the worst vices of his exuberance. The 
image is a jumble of tautology, in which rank rhetoric overpowers 
good sense: — it is literary glitter, not political judgment. It may 
serve to test the difference between the eloquence of Pitt and that of 
Burke. Pitt was given to extravagance : but it was the fiery passion 
of the statesman, not the verbal embroidery of an orator. Chester- 
field had already put the truth in simpler words when he wrote, " It 
is a Mosaic ministry made up of pieces rapporte'es from different con- 
nections." As a fact, the Chatham ministry contained many honest 
and capable men, four able statesmen, one very brilliant orator. If 
Pitt could have remained in the House of Commons, have retained 
his health and his personal ascendency, the government, which was 
a ministry of measures, not of parties, nor of Houses, might have 
done excellent service and have spared us the war with America. 

N 



178 CHATHAM [chap. 

" when the people should condemn him he should 
tremble ; but would set his face against the proudest 
connection in this country." The Duke of Eichmond 
took this up with heat. "He hoped the nobility- 
would not be brow-beaten by an insolent minister." 
Chatham hotly replied. The world believed that the 
Duke had silenced his opponent. The House required 
both Lords to keep the peace. And as a fact, Chatham 
did not again appear in the House of Lords during his 
own administration. It was too true that disease, 
nervous tension, and an overbearing nature were 
making Chatham impracticable as a Parliamentary 
Minister. 

There could be no character more hopelessly out 
of place in forming an administration than Chatham 
in the crisis of his nervous maladies, unless it were 
Coriolanus standing for the Consulate. Mr. Pitt had 
been haughty : but the Earl of Chatham was insolent. 
He'offended the very men he was inviting to join him. 
When Lord Edgecombe, the Treasurer of the House- 
hold and a strong supporter of his policy, declined to 
resign, as required, and referred to his own parlia- 
mentary interest, Chatham broke out: "I despise 
your parliamentary interest ! I do not want your 
assistance — I dare look in the face the proudest con- 
nections in this country." After inviting the Duke of 
Bedford to a friendly conference, he treated him so 
that his Grace withdrew "in astonishment and angry 
disgust." General Conway, his Secretary of State, 
was so deeply offended by Chatham's scornful silence 
and high-handed proceedings, that he could hardly be 
induced to retain his seals. He behaved, said Conway, 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 179 

like the Sultan of Constantinople. And, what was 
perhaps his most unfortunate mistake, Chatham re- 
buffed Edmund Burke with a coolness which that 
aspiring orator never forgave. Curiously enough, it 
was Burke's Free Trade ideas which so deeply offended 
Chatham's craze for Preferential duties within the 
Empire. So true is it that ideas of Empire and of 
Protection go hand in hand ! During the first few 
months of his ministry, whilst Chatham retained some 
possession of his faculties, his whole remaining energies 
were taken up with angry altercations, fruitless 
negotiations, bitter rebuffs, and incessant resignations. 
It is a pitiful story, for it is the story of disease, of the 
wreck of a powerful mind and a grand nature under 
the degeneration of the nervous system. 

In such a state of things the policy of government 
was utterly chaotic ; and the House of Commons be- 
came the arena of casual intrigues and personal pre- 
tensions. And withal there was a strange sense that 
their real master was in a trance, that there was a 
head of government somewhere, invisible and inactive 
as he seemed. This was wonderfully expressed in a 
famous speech of Burke. " Perhaps this House is not 
the place where our reasons can be of any avail : the 
great person who is to determine on this question may 
be a being far above our view ; one so immeasurably 
high, that the greatest abilities (pointing to Mr. 
Townshend), or the most amiable dispositions that are 
to be found in this House (pointing to Mr. Conway) 
may not gain access to him; a being before whom 
1 thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers' 
(waving his hand over the Treasury bench), all veil 



180 CHATHAM [chap. 

their faces with their wings. But, though our argu- 
ments may not reach him, probably our prayers may ! " 
Burke then apostrophised the Great Minister above, 
that rules and governs over all, to have mercy and not 
to destroy the work of his own hands. All this is 
eloquent — almost poetry — and highly characteristic of 
two men of genius. It is magnificent invective de- 
riding the mysterious stupor of a great statesman. 

Chatham was hardly seated in office before he re- 
newed his old scheme of a vast continental alliance to 
counterbalance the union of the House of Bourbon in 
the monarchies of France and Spain. Before taking 
office he had stipulated for this from the King. His 
mind was still under the formidable shadow of the 
Family Compact of 1761. In his first Cabinet Council 
he passed a minute for forming a Triple Defensive 
Alliance with Great Britain, Russia, and Prussia as 
principals, with purport to invite the accession of Den- 
mark, Sweden, and Holland, with such of the German 
and other powers as could be brought in by mutual 
agreement. 1 This he described as forming " a firm 
and solid system in the North to counterbalance the 
great and formidable alliance framed by the House of 
Bourbon." Special embassies and instructions were at 
once sent to St. Petersburg and to Berlin to consolidate 
the alliance — " to establish a firm and solid system for 
the maintenance of the public tranquillity," wrote 
Chatham himself to his ambassador in Berlin. If 
Frederick would accede to this alliance, "I see before 

lr rhe insolent and audacious Townshend said, as he left the 
Council, " Chatham shows us what inferior animals we are ! His 
superiority is transcendent ! " 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 181 

us," added Chatham, "a happy prospect of durable 
tranquillity." It seems that Chatham really intended 
a defensive alliance, and was seriously alarmed at the 
attitude of France. He evidently considered war to 
be within measurable calculations. 

Was this a mere delusion ? Not altogether. The 
whole force of France and of Spain was now in the 
hands of men of vigour and ambition. The Bourbon 
combination was a very real thing, and possessed vast 
latent resources. The Austrian Empire was now its 
friend, and incessant secret efforts were made to attach 
to itself Sweden, Poland, and other powers. Choiseul, 
a French counterpart of Pitt in his way, was straining 
every nerve to restore the navy of France, and in four 
years he accomplished this end whilst he was making 
secret preparations to strike at England. Choiseul 
and Chatham distrusted, watched, and feared each 
other. 1 And it must always be remembered that, only 
three years after Chatham's death, the triumph of the 
United States was secured at York Town mainly by 
the overwhelming superiority of the French fleet in 
American waters. 



1 Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice has collected documentary evidence 
of all this. He writes {Life of Shelburne, ii. 3) : "Ever since the 
peace, Choiseul and Grimaldi had been scheming how to win back 
what they had lost. They had gained Austria to their alliance ; they 
were intriguing in Stockholm, and plotting in Copenhagen ; they were 
fishing in the troubled waters of Polish politics ; their emissaries 
traversed the English colonies ; their spies surveyed the defences of 
the English coast ; Portsmouth was to be destroyed, and Gibraltar 
to be seized by a coup de main; Avignon was to be annexed to 
France, and Portugal to Spain ; Corsica was to be invaded ; Geneva 
was threatened." The two ministers resolved to wait. " Their only 
fear was lest Chatham should precipitate hostilities." 



182 CHATHAM [chap. 

But if there was real ground for guarding against 
the designs of the Bourbon monarchies to retaliate 
upon the power which had crushed and despoiled 
them, there is no answer to the admirable wisdom of 
Frederick in declining to enter a new coalition. Eussia 
was now on more friendly terms with him than she 
was with England. She thought a Prussian alliance 
quite sufficient support, as it certainly was. In reply 
to the proposed triple alliance, Frederick said he now 
saw no likelihood of war. France, in her exhausted 
state, could not make war ; Spain even less, owing to 
her internal troubles. Such a confederation as was 
proposed would give jealousy to other powers, and 
afford a pretext for disturbing the general tranquillity. 
Alliances made with a view to distant events "are 
matters of ostentation." The Italians had a proverb — 
Chi sta bene non se muove, i.e. " Leave well alone." 

The Prussian King added that he feared the many 
questions outstanding between England and France 
would be the occasion of a new war between them, in 
which Prussia would have no interest to engage. He 
was now determined to devote himself to the peaceful 
organisation of his own kingdom, and to restore the 
sacrifices made in the late war. He could not forget 
the way in which he had been treated when England 
hurried on a peace without considering the interests 
of her Prussian ally. The peace had been followed 
by a series of weak and shifting governments in 
England. And, much as he respected his friend who 
had now succeeded to power, he feared that, in becom- 
ing Earl of Chatham, Mr. Pitt had greatly injured the 
power he used to wield. Here as elsewhere, one is 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 183 

impressed with the truth that Frederick n. as a 
statesman was far the greatest man of the eighteenth 
century. 

Another grand scheme on which Chatham's mind 
was now bent was the future settlement of the new 
Empire in India. A vast territory larger than the 
British Islands, with a population of twenty millions 
and a revenue of five or six millions a year, was now 
held by a trading company, whose dominant ideas 
were plunder and dividends. Their officials were 
insubordinate and rapacious, and the conquered sub- 
jects were the victims of every form of misrule and 
extortion. At home the proprietors cared for nothing 
but to increase the dividends, which they intended to 
fix by a guarantee of ten years at fifteen per cent, on 
their holdings. This system of irresponsible iniquity 
Chatham resolved to close. And the first step was to 
bring the conquered lands under the control of the 
Crown, and to make a parliamentary settlement of 
revenues which the tradesmen claimed as their private 
perquisite. 

In letters to his colleagues Chatham speaks of "the 
transcendent object, East India affairs/' " the greatest 
of all objects" — the question as to the right of the 
Company to dispose of this enormous revenue. His 
view of the right was this, as he explained long after- 
wards : — There was a mixed right to the territorial 
revenues of the conquered provinces between the 
State and the Company — ■ the State being entitled to 
the larger share as the larger contributor by its fleet 
and men. And the Company's share could never be 
considered as private property to be divided as profits, 



184 CHATHAM [chap. 

but must be held in trust for the public purposes of 
defence of India and the extension of trade. He held 
that conquests of vast territories, never contemplated 
by the Company's charter and mainly made by the 
forces of the Crown, could confer no indefeasible rights 
of sovereignty on a body of traders. These noble pro- 
vinces must be claimed as dominions of the Crown, 
and governed as such. The Charter had only secured 
to the Company a few factories on the rivers and 
coasts, but not such vast provinces as Bengal, Orissa, 
and Behar. The merchants were entitled to their 
commercial privileges and a moderate return for their 
invested capital. 

So far Chatham's statesmanlike insight has been 
amply justified by events. But his eager ambition 
saw visions of an era of just and beneficent govern- 
ment dispensed to the people of India ; and, in place 
of " enriching a band of greedy factors," a revenue 
which should eventually lighten the taxation of our 
country, and extinguish the debt which had been 
created by the wars. In this his anticipations egregi- 
ously outran the facts. Like the rest of his contem- 
poraries, he greatly overrated the wealth of Hindustan. 
And he wholly failed to gauge the narrow and self- 
seeking spirits by whom he was served and surrounded. 
In the result something was effected, but his noble 
hopes of reforming the government of India were 
destroyed by the intrigues of his colleagues and the 
breakdown of his own powers. 

Chatham's first aim was to obtain a searching inquiry 
in Parliament; and for this purpose he put up his 
friend, Alderman Beckford, to move for this as an 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 185 

independent member of the House of Commons. 
Chatham himself declined to formulate any scheme of 
reform until the inquiry was complete, nor would he 
even submit a scheme to his Cabinet. There was 
nothing in this course unusual in such cases of com- 
plicated legislation. The inquiry was warmly opposed 
in successive debates by the Opposition leaders, who 
defended the Company in the name of their Charter. 
It is one of the ironies of history that the most 
eloquent speech in resisting any restraint on the 
arbitrary powers of the Company was delivered by 
Edmund Burke. He made one of his most brilliant 
orations in defence of the colleagues and patrons of 
Clive and Hastings — a speech wherein occurred the 
Apocalyptic attack on Chatham already cited. Had 
Chatham succeeded in reorganising the government of 
India in 1766, Burke would not have had to denounce 
such a record of crimes and tyranny as he unfolded at 
Westminster in 1788. 

When the inquiry came before the House, and dur- 
ing the debates, Chatham was in his sick-room, either 
at Marlborough, Hampstead, or at Bath, occasionally 
dictating peremptory letters to Grafton and Shelburne, 
but attending no Councils nor appearing in Parlia- 
ment. Conway, whom he had deeply offended, and 
Townshend, the brilliant mountebank, whom he had 
so unwisely placed in the Exchequer, both played false 
to their paralysed chief and thwarted any serious 
inquiry. Chatham (by correspondence) thundered 
against the weakness and disloyalty of his colleagues, 
reiterated, with his usual vehemence, his anxieties, his 
fears, and his behests. Some check was put on the 



186 CHATHAM [chap. 

division of the spoil. But nothing effective came of 
it; and for a generation India remained the happy 
hunting-ground of British " nabobs." 

Another urgent reform attempted by the Chatham 
ministry was to remedy the gross misgovernment of 
Ireland. The rule of that kingdom was a corrupt 
oligarchy, controlled by Lords Justices, with little inter- 
ference from the central government, and a Parliament 
of borough-mongers, elected for the life of the King. 
In 1767 Lord Townshend was sent over by Chatham 
as Viceroy, with instructions to remain in constant 
residence, virtually superseding the irresponsible power 
of the Lords Justices. The new ministry were pre- 
pared to support a Septennial Act to limit the duration 
of the Irish Parliament, to reform the tenure of the 
Judges on the English basis, of holding office " during 
good conduct " and not u during pleasure " of the 
Crown. The whole conduct of Pitt, as of Chatham, 
whether in his two ministries as well as before and 
after both of them, was to extend towards Ireland the 
same spirit of liberal government, the same respect 
for local liberties and popular representation which 
he advocated towards the Colonies. But the utter 
collapse of his health prevented Chatham during his 
second administration from carrying through any 
effective reform — just as it had done in the case of 
the government of India. 

Tho next escapade of the unscrupulous rhetorician 
to whom Chatham had entrusted the finances of the 
country was to allow the Opposition to reduce the 
land tax from four to three shillings in the pound. By 
this blunder the Exchequer lost half a million, the 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 187 

amount, as Chesterfield said, " of the bribe the landed 
gentlemen had voted to themselves." Chatham was 
incensed with Townshend for this and for his conduct 
in the India question, and wrote that he or the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer must quit office. He 
would have acted on this threat, but now he fell into 
such a state of nervous prostration that he declined to 
take part in any business, or even to have matters of 
business referred to him at all. 

In the meantime Charles Townshend broke out into 
an act of reckless folly, far more serious than any of 
his previous extravagances. Without consulting his 
colleagues, he proposed an import duty on various 
goods entering America. To this the Cabinet objected ; 
but, in the absence of Chatham, unable even to consult 
him, to resist Townshend, or to dismiss him, the 
ministers accepted the measure, which quietly passed 
both Houses. The ignorance of the times, and the 
arrogant complacency of the home government was 
such that this critical step passed without opposition 
and with little remark. It was the beginning of the 
long and ruinous struggle which for twenty years 
divided the mother country and her American colonies. 

The Duke of Grafton, Chatham's most trusted 
friend, quotes the Earl's letter to himself (March 
1767), to the effect that " the East India business was 
the capital object of the publick upon which Lord 
Chatham would stand or fall." He then tells us how 
" a suppressed gout falling on his nerves, to a degree 
sufficient to master his resolution," rendered Chatham 
unfit to see any of his colleagues. " From this time 
he became invisible." "Here, in fact, was the end of 



188 CHATHAM [chap. 

his administration." The Duke and the Chancellor 
went to the King and told him that the ministry was 
in fact dissolved, and they urged George to call upon 
Chatham to advise him as to his course. All that they 
got was a statement in Lady Chatham's handwriting 
declining any visit. The King wrote within the month 
of June no less than eight letters to his Prime Minister 
urging on him the chaos into which government had 
fallen, imploring him to see the Duke or to give some 
suggestion as to what should be done. To every appeal 
came the same reply. He is overwhelmed with the 
boundless extent of the royal goodness. He lays him- 
self at the King's feet. In his extreme weakness of 
nerves and spirits he " could not sustain the weight of 
an audience " : he could not offer any suggestion ; he 
is utterly incapable of the smallest effort. 

The Duke did obtain one interview with Chatham, 
and he reports : "His nerves and spirits were affected 
to a dreadful degree : and the sight of his great mind 
bowed down, and thus weakened by disorder, would 
have filled me with grief and concern, even if I had not 
borne a sincere attachment to his person and char- 
acter." It appeared, he says, like cruelty to have to 
put a man he valued to so great suffering. All that 
the Duke could wring from his shattered chief was a 
request to remain in office and to open negotiations 
with the Bedfords rather than the Rockinghams — 
advice truly unfortunate, to be explained only by aber- 
ration of mind. At this time his condition is thus 
described by the secretary of George Grenville as 
"the lowest dejection and debility that mind or body 
can be in." He sits all day leaning on his hands which 



ix.] THE CHATHAM MINISTRY 189 

rested on a table : would permit no one to remain in his 
room, knocks when he needs anything and then silently 
signals to the attendant to retire. At the mention of 
politics he starts and trembles violently from head to 
foot. He could bear no noise, and his children had to 
be removed from his roof. To avoid sound, he took 
house after house near his own. He ordered planta- 
tions to be made round his garden at ruinous cost and 
hurried on with feverish haste by night as by day. 
His appetite was sickly and uncertain. He could bear 
no delay ; and kept chickens ready cooked at any hour 
that he felt able to eat. By a deed he gave Lady 
Chatham a power of attorney to transact all business 
of every kind. He moved from Hampstead to 
Somersetshire, and then to Bath. He passionately 
sought to repurchase Hayes Place, which he had sold 
to Mr. Thomas Walpole. "That might have saved 
me ! " he murmured, when the purchaser hesitated to 
part with his bargain. But at Lady Chatham's earnest 
entreaty, Walpole reluctantly consented to surrender 
the place. 

Such was the pitiable nervous prostration of the 
" great Earl," in which the Chatham administration 
fell to pieces, whilst the seeds of future disaster were 
sown thick in the confusion of parties and the tangle 
of folly, intrigue, and obstinacy in which politics were 
plunged. It was natural that spiteful and scandalous 
reports were rife in the world. Some said he was 
mad: others that he was shamming madness. Even 
Horace Walpole allowed his ill-nature so far to over- 
come his good sense as to put it on record that he 
inclined to think his extravagances were feigned. The 



190 CHATHAM [chap. ix. 

lampoons were continual, and the pseudo-Jnnius called 
him " a lunatic brandishing a crutch." He could no 
longer " lie on his back and talk fustian," as Burke 
said. He was not at all insane : still less was he acting 
a part. He was afflicted with nervous paralysis, and 
sat impotent and silent. And the fortunes of England 
were delivered over to the perverse ambition of a 
dogged King, to the mischievous counsels of a dis- 
tracted ministry, whilst the greatest brain and the 
finest soul of the age lay as it were in some mysterious 
trance. 1 



1 Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, when preparing his Life of Shel- 
burne, obtained from Sir Andrew Clark an opinion as to Chatham's 
complaint. " Suppressed gout disordered the whole nervous sys- 
tem, and drove him into a state of mental depression, varying with 
excitement and equivalent to insanity. But there was no specific 
brain disease." After a bad attack of external gout the patient 
entirely recovered his force of mind. 



CHAPTER X 

DEFENCE OF IRELAND AND INDIA 

The remaining years of Chatham's life, from his final 
resignation of office in October 1768, until his death in 
May 1778, were broken by long intervals of retirement 
and disease, but were illuminated by some splendid 
efforts from time to time to withstand the follies and 
crimes of those in power, to call out the moral sense of 
his countrymen, to give voice to the inmost warning 
of conscience, of reason, and justice. He warmly 
defended the freedom and independence of the Parlia- 
ment of Ireland. He passionately called for reforma- 
tion of the corrupt government of India, such as might 
win the confidence and affections of the native 
population. He constantly pressed for a Eeform of 
Parliament and the amendment of the system of close 
Boroughs. He was regarded as the champion of the 
Protestant Dissenters against the prejudices and ex- 
clusions of a pampered Establishment. He warned the 
nation of the danger of allowing the strength of the 
Navy to be reduced, a warning the force of which was 
so soon to be justified at York Town. But the main 
strength of his efforts in public and in private was 
given all through these years to the struggle with the 

191 



192 CHATHAM [chap. 

American Colonies. By speeches in the House of 
Lords, by appeals to influential men, in conferences 
with Dr. Franklin, in many personal negotiations, he 
strove to stem the oppressive policy of the King, and to 
satisfy the just claims of the American States. He 
inveighed, with horror and with a magnificence of 
language which has grown to be a part of English 
literature, against the perverse folly of prolonging a 
hopeless and disastrous Civil War, and against the 
inhuman barbarities which too often disgraced it. 

The course of time, the slow advance of justice and 
morality in matters of State, have justified every one 
of these warnings and appeals. Chatham was the 
precursor in fact of reforms which were not achieved 
until the century which followed his own : which even 
yet have been but imperfectly effected: some of 
which are burning problems with us still to-day. It is 
to be numbered amongst the heaviest clouds which 
darken the history of our country, that these splendid 
attempts of the fallen statesman were heard by the 
King and his creatures with sullen disdain. Not one 
of them had any effect in changing the course of events 
or in mitigating the disasters and humiliations which 
criminal folly entailed on its authors. But whilst 
these noble words of the lonely statesman are enshrined 
in the records of our country, he will not be to future 
generations that which he was to his own — a voice 
crying in the wilderness. In the eyes of those who 
place Honour and Justice above Empire, who place the 
Happiness of the People above Glory and Conquests, 
the last ten years of Chatham's career, though he 
laboured in vain to convince a besotted faction, and to 



x.] DEFENCE OF IRELAND AND INDIA 193 

reverse a policy of ruin, will always stand forth with 
a truer brilliance than the five years of his dictatorship 
when he sent forth fleets to annihilate those of our 
rivals, and organised the armies which conquered an 
Empire. 

The state of his health, his irritable and domineer- 
ing temper, the angry air of suspicion and jealousy in 
the competing factions amongst whom he lived, whose 
suspicions he so deeply imbibed, rendered this period 
of Chatham's life a melancholy failure. Had he been 
born to the throne of an hereditary despot, as were 
King Frederick and the Emperor Joseph, had his mind 
not been unhinged by disease, and his nature not 
soured by the enmity of weak men born into great 
power, Chatham would have proved one of the most 
triumphant rulers of modern times. If he had pos- 
sessed the adroitness of Walpole, the serene wisdom of 
Washington, the patience and knowledge of the world 
of his own son, he might have again commanded the 
country. But never was man less patient, less toler- 
ant of weakness, more disdainful of all the arts of 
compromise and conciliation. If only he could have 
formed a genuine and permanent alliance with Rock- 
ingham, Camden, Shelburne, and Burke, from the 
hour when he recovered command of his powers; if 
only, with all his devotion to the Constitution, he 
could have conceived the position of a Constitutional 
Minister ; if, once the idol of the people, he could have 
remained in the House of Commons, and could have 
carried through its Reform — then our country might 
have been saved from some of its worst excesses in 
India, in Ireland, and at home, and from some of its 
o 



194 CHATHAM [chap. 

bitterest humiliations in America. But what Horace 
Walpole called his " presumptuous impracticability" 
made such a coalition impossible from the first. 

When, in January 1767, Chatham was attacked with 
gout and retired to Bath, his colleagues never saw him 
again ; and the confusion was unexampled in modern 
history. As Burke said long afterwards — " when his 
face was hid but for a moment, his whole system was 
on a wide sea, without chart or compass." His col- 
leagues never presumed to have an opinion of their 
own. They were whirled about, the sport of every 
gust. They turned the vessel wholly out of the course 
of his policy. It was thus that, using his name, they 
proceeded to tax America. Lord Charlemont wrote 
(9th April) — " Charles Townshend is at open war, 
Conway is angry, Lord Shelburne out of humour, and 
the Duke of Grafton by no means pleased. The ministry 
is divided into as many parties as there are men in it." 

All this time George kept writing friendly letters 
to Chatham, insisting on his remaining in office — 
" though confined to your house, your name has been 
sufficient to enable my administration to proceed. I, 
therefore, in the most earnest manner, call on you to 
continue in your employment " (the King to Chatham, 
January 23, 1768). George could easily afford to be 
gracious. He obtained the great name of the Earl, 
who could do nothing, who knew nothing. In the 
meantime, the King was having his own way, and 
carrying on what he naively called " his administra- 
tion." 

In the month of January 1768 a wretched job 
made it necessary to set the Privy Seal to an appoint- 



x.] DEFENCE OF IRELAND AND INDIA 195 

ment. As Chatham was incapable even of this effort, 
three private persons were named commissioners to 
act for six weeks. The King and his ministers would 
not let their victim go. For months things stagnated 
and went to chaos, Lady Chatham answering all appeals 
and refusing all interviews. At last, in October 1768, 
a letter in her handwriting was sent to the Duke of 
Grafton begging him to obtain the King's permission 
to resign the Privy Seal. The Duke hesitated and 
pressed the Earl to remain. The King, almost losing 
his temper, wrote directly to Lord Chatham — " I think 
I have a right to insist on your remaining in my service." 
An abject letter, in her ladyship's hand — a letter which 
a Grand Vizier might have sent to Sultan Amurath — 
(October 14) finally closed this melancholy episode, 
and brought to an end the Chatham ministry. It had 
lasted nominally two years and two months. It had 
at last found strength enough to insist on dying. 

The appearance of Chatham on the political field in 
the last years of his life was so irregular and spas- 
modic, had so little practical effect on legislation and 
government, and was itself so seldom continuous, that 
it would be inconvenient to record it in chronological 
order. It must be grouped under a few distinct sub- 
jects ; and it will be best to collect his utterances and 
schemes under the following heads: (1) the good 
government of Ireland, of India, and other parts of 
the Empire; (2) Constitutional questions and the 
function of Parliament; (3) the quarrel with the 
American Colonies, and the formation of the United 
States. 

With regard to Ireland, the administration of which 



196 CHATHAM [chap. 

Chatham was the nominal head, had started in July 
1766 with excellent intentions : — the reform of the 
Irish Parliament, the independence of the Irish Judges, 
a Habeas Corpus Act, and the abolition of the griev- 
ances of the monstrous Pension list. In short, it was 
consistently Chatham's principle to give Ireland a 
genuine Irish government, to make the Irish Parlia- 
ment solely responsible for Irish taxation, and to re- 
quire from the Lord-Lieutenant continuous residence 
in Dublin. The collapse of Chatham's health, and the 
disorganisation into which this threw his colleagues, 
had prevented any of these urgent reforms being car- 
ried through. 

Although Chatham never at any time was able to 
effect any reform in Ireland, we are not left in doubt 
about the principles which he maintained. The very re- 
markable correspondence between him and Lord Shel- 
burne, in October 1773, fully explains his views. In 
that year it was proposed to put a tax of two shillings 
in the pound on the net annual profits of all land- 
owners in Ireland ivho should not actually reside in the 
Kingdom for six months in each year. It was hotly 
urged by the English party both there and in Britain 
that any such Bill, if carried in the Irish Parliament, 
should be annulled by the Crown. Lord Shelburne, 
whose family held great Irish estates, consulted 
Chatham as to the course to be pursued. Chatham's 
answer was emphatic — against any interference from 
England. This proposal, he said, however severe 
against absentees, is founded in strong Irish policy, to 
compel more of the product of Irish estates to be spent 
in Ireland, and not here. 



x.] DEFENCE OF IRELAND AND INDIA 197 

" England, it is evident, profits by draining Ireland of the 
vast incomes spent here from that country. But I could not, 
as an English peer, advise the King on principles of indirect, 
accidental English policy, to reject a tax on absentees, sent 
over here, as the genuine desire of the Commons of Ireland, 
acting in their proper and peculiar sphere, and exercising their 
inherent, exclusive right, by raising supplies in the manner they 
think best. This great principle of the Constitution is so funda- 
mental, and with me so sacred and indispensable, that it 
outweighs all other considerations." 

Lord Kockingkam opposed all this, and pressed 
Sherburne to join him in having the Bill disallowed. 
And Edmund Burke vehemently denounced the 
Absentee Tax. Here a second time we find Burke 
resisting, and Chatham defending, a reform in the 
interest of the poor cultivators of the soil. As Burke 
had opposed Chatham's attempt to check the abuses of 
Indian " nabobs," so we find him opposed to Chatham's 
view as to taxing the Irish absentees. The correspon- 
dence continued ; and Shelburne very honourably gave 
way to the superior wisdom and generosity of Chatham. 
In a second letter, Chatham admitted that all his 
personal prejudices were with Irish landowners, for 
two of his relations held considerable estates. Never- 
theless, he continues — 

" The fitness or justice of the tax in question, I shall not 
consider, if the Commons of Ireland send it here." . . . " The 
line of the Constitution — a line written in the broadest letter, 
through every page of the history of parliament and people — 
tells me, that the Commons are to judge of the propriety and 
expediency of supplies." " This power of the purse in the 
Commons is fundamental and inherent ; to translate it from 
them to the King in Council, is to annihilate Parliament." 

In result, the landowners succeeded in having the 



198 CHATHAM [chap. 

Bill thrown out in the Irish Parliament; and the 
perilous resort to King George's fiat was not required. 
But the letters display how intensely Chatham held by 
his doctrine that the taxes of the Irish people could 
only be voted by their own representatives — in their 
own Parliament. 

The critical question of the independence of the 
National Parliament of Ireland was not decided until 
long after Chatham's time. But, whatever doubts he 
may have once had, he repeatedly declared himself 
to his colleague, Lord Shelburne, as opposed to the 
legislative Union of the Irish and British Parliaments, 
on the ground of the bad effect it would have on 
the English Parliament. This Lord Shelburne com- 
municated to Arthur Young. The Irish Speaker, when 
resisting the Union in February 1800, repeated that 
Lord Chatham had always objected to the Union, lest 
the additional members from Ireland might alter the 
constitution of the House. It is clear that the people 
of Ireland had felt at least as much enthusiasm for the 
Liberal Statesman as did the people of Scotland and of 
England. The merchants and traders of Dublin had 
presented him with an address of admiration on his 
retirement from office. And the citizens of Cork had 
placed a marble statue of him in their Exchange. 

During Chatham's own ministry, the urgent need of 
reform in the government of India was ever in his 
mind. He wrote from Bath to Lord Shelburne 
(January 1767) about "the transcendent object which 
possesses my mind, the East India business." But in 
his absence, in spite of constant exchange of letters 
with Shelburne and Townshend, nothing effective 



x.] DEFENCE OF IRELAND AND INDIA 199 

could be done. In February the Duke of Grafton 
wrote with an account of a meeting of ministers, 
" they were most thoroughly convinced that his pres- 
ence was absolutely necessary to give dignity to the 
administration and to carry through this affair (the 
most important of all) of the East India Company, in 
which they all think that there is no stirring without 
your assistance and concurrence." And the Duke 
frankly adds that he is ready to join in any plan which 
approved itself to the great experience and ability of 
his chief. But nothing beyond abortive attempts came 
from this headless administration. 

For years, as we know, abortive attempts were made 
to solve the problem of Indian Government, a problem 
which wrecked one minister after another. Lord 
Chatham does not seem to have spoken in the House 
on these questions; but in letters to his colleagues 
from time to time we find what his views and advice 
had been. Colonel Barre, who had now become his 
friend and warm supporter, asked Chatham's opinion as 
to the Bill promoted by the East India Company to 
enable them to raise further military forces (February 
1771). Other friends asked for his views. Chatham 
replies (21st February 1771) : — 

" As to the East India Company's Bill for recruiting, I 
disapprove it absolutely. I have seen regalities taken away 
by Act of Parliament; and shall not concur in an Act to 
attribute sovereign power in England to Leadenhall Street. 
I think the attempt daring, and the power preposterous : 
out of all line of the Constitution." 

When, in 1772 and 1773, public opinion forced the 
government of Lord North to carry through the India 



200 CHATHAM [chap. 

Acts designed to stop the worst enormities of the 
Company's Raj and to transfer their irresponsible 
power to a body representing the State at home, 
Chatham was unable to take part in debate, but we 
find him at every point warmly supporting the Reforms. 
The Report of the Secret Committee of December 
1772, on which the government action was based, m£t 
with Chatham's hearty approval : — 

"I am much edified with it. As far as it has gone, I 
like the spirit of it well ; as it does ' nothing extenuate, nor 
set down aught in malice. , 

" Trade in India, internal and external, stands at present 
on little else than the guns of our ships and fortresses : a 
forced foundation ivhich ivill fail, if not timely strengthened 
by a system of justice and humanity, of sounder and larger 
policy.^ 

When the Acts of 1773 came on for debate, Chatham 
from his retreat in Somersetshire warmly applauded 
the efforts of Colonel Bar re, who took the lead in 
arguing the case with what Chatham writes to 
Shelburne was a " noble and universally applauded 
speech on India." The case of the Company and 
their " vested interests w in extortion, oppression, and 
fraud, was maintained by Edmund Burke, who took 
the lead on the side of opposition. Strange destiny, 
which for the third time found Burke the passionate 
advocate of Property and Reaction, whilst Chatham 
was a stout champion of the People and of Reform ! 
There was some strange antipathy between these two 
men — the finest brains and natures of their time. 
Both were high-minded, profound in insight, generous, 
with passionate imagination. Burke was a philosopher, 



x.] DEFENCE OF IRELAND AND INDIA 201 

a man of letters, an idealist, and a born Conservative. 
Chatham was a man of action with a genius for 
efficiency, a popular tribune, but a born ruler of men. 
In May 1773, Chatham again pressed on Shelburne 
that " Indian affairs are in a most interesting crisis ; 
nor can any public object be more important to the 
honour and welfare of the nation." The government, 
with a majority in both Houses, were carrying their 
Bill to limit the irresponsible liberty of the Company, 
whose vested interests under charter were being 
passionately defended by the Rockingham party and 
the " nabob w ring. As to the claim of the Company 
to the entire revenue that could be squeezed out of the 
natives, Chatham writes : — 

"Dividends are in their nature strictly limited to the 
profits of trade ; anything more is undue, and an imposition 
and defrauding of the public services. Inland trade ex- 
clusive of the natives is the rankest and most odious 
oppression to be abolished for ever. This, together with 
the want of justice in judicature, has lost us the favourable 
dispositions of Hindostan. Justice should be solidly estab- 
lished under independent judges, holding their offices as the 
judges here, removable only by Address of Parliament, and 
under severest penalties if they meddle in trade." 

This was directed against the monstrous system 
under which the officials of the Company claimed 
complete monopoly of the inland trade of the Pen- 
insula, fixing themselves the prices at which they 
chose both to buy and sell. 

Well might Lord Shelburne write to Chatham that 
" the crimes and frauds of the servants in India, enor- 
mous as they appear in the Reports, are not yet fully 
stated. The Directors, occupied in domestic, pur suits 



202 CHATHAM £chap. 

equally fraudulent, have produced the effect of accom- 
plices throughout ; while the proprietors who, as the 
last resort, ought to be the purest to the objects of their 
charter, appear the most servile instruments of both." 
To this Chatham replies : — 

"India teems with iniquities so rank, as to smell to 
heaven and earth. The reformation of them, if pursued in 
a pure spirit of justice, might exalt the nation, and endear 
the English name throughout the world ; but the generous 
purpose is no sooner conceived in the hearts of the few, but 
by-ends and sinister interests taint the execution, and power 
is grasped at, where redress should be the only object. 

" The putting under circumscription and control the high 
and dangerous prerogatives of war and alliances, so abused 
in India, I cannot but approve, as it shuts the door against 
insatiable rapine and detestable enormities, as have, on 
some occasions, stained the English name, and disgraced 
human nature. I approve, too, of the nomination of judges 
by the Crown ; but as they are to hold their offices during 
pleasure, I cannot consider them as judges, but as dependent 
instruments of power. 

" The abolition of inland trade on private accounts is 
highly laudable, as far as that provision goes ; but I would 
assuredly carry the prohibition further, and open again to 
the natives and other Eastern merchants the inland trade 
of Bengal, and abolish all monopolies on the Company's 
account ; which now operate to the unjust exclusion of an 
oppressed people, and to the impoverishing and alienating 
of these extensive and populous provinces. The hearts and 
good affections of Bengal are of more worth than all the profits 
of ruinous and odious monopolies" 

In the summer of 1769, the town was startled, and 
all the political quidnuncs were set in motion by the 
unexpected appearance of Chatham at the King's 
Levee, and an interview between them afterwards in 
the closet. It had come about in this way. In the 



x.] DEFENCE OF IRELAND AND INDIA 203 

autumn of the preceding year, Chatham had another 
severe attack of gout, and a second in the following 
spring. This seemed to clear his brain and restore 
his nerves. He became reconciled to Lord Temple, 
who visited him at Hayes, and effusively had the visit 
recorded as " a most cordial, firm, and perpetual union, 
to which Mr. Grenville has heartily acceded." The 
invalid had shaken off his gloom, and after two years 
and a half, he not only came up to London, but he 
attended the Levee. The circumstance must be told 
in the inimitable language of Horace Walpole. 

" Lord Chatham appeared at the King's Levee when 
it was thought he would never produce himself again, 
or was not fit to be produced in public. He was 
perfectly well, and had grown fat. The Duke of 
Grafton had just time to apprise the King of this 
mysterious visit. The King was very gracious, and 
whispered him to come into the closet after the levee, 
which he did, and stayed there twenty minutes." 
And then the lively diarist pours forth the gossip of 
the day with all its suspicions and rumours. Had the 
ex-minister, who seemed to have risen from the dead 
to overthrow all the combinations of the day, and 
to make new, come to consult with the King about 
the Middlesex election of Wilkes, or had he come to 
claim power for himself ? Had he been sent for, or 
did he come up of his own accord ? Why was he so 
cold to the Duke of Grafton and the Duke of Bedford ? 
Why so friendly to Lord Granby and General Harvey ? 
And was Lord Temple in the game ? and so forth, as 
Chatham lingered after the audience, as if to convince 
the Court that he had recovered his health and under- 
standing. 



204 CHATHAM [chap. 

He had indeed fluttered the Volscians at St. James's. 
Lord Mansfield had hoped the ministry could hold on, 
"if that madman Chatham did not come to throw a 
fire-ball amongst them ? w Had he thrown it ? Burke 
wondered if he had only come to talk some "creeping, 
explanatory, ambiguous matter in the true Chathamic 
style." Explanatory perhaps ; but was Chatham often 
ambiguous, was he ever creeping ? As a matter of fact, 
Chatham now felt himself restored to health and life, 
and resolved to show the King and the world that 
he was. We now know exactly what had been 
Chatham's purpose, and what he said. Nothing could 
be simpler and more straightforward. The Duke of 
Grafton wrote a minute at the time of what had 
passed, evidently from the King's own words. 

George was gracious, regretted that illness had 
caused the Earl's resignation. Chatham replied that 
he could not continue to serve when unable to approve 
what he thought good, or dissent from what he thought 
bad. He thought this recent case (Wilkes's) had been 
mismanaged. It ought to have been treated with 
contempt from the first. And he was not satisfied 
with what had been done as to Indian government, 
and the powers left with the Company. He did not 
think his health would ever allow him again to attend 
in Parliament. If it did, and he should dissent from 
any measure proposed, he hoped his Majesty would 
believe that it did not arise from any personal con- 
sideration, as he had not a tittle to find fault with 
in the conduct of any individual. "His Majesty 
might be assured that it could not arise from ambition, 
as he felt so strongly the weak state from which he 



x.] DEFENCE OF IRELAND AND INDIA 205 

was recovering, and which might daily threaten him, 
that office therefore of any sort could no longer be 
desirable to him." 

From this hour Chatham neither held nor sought 
any office, nor did he ever see the King again. The 
history of England might have been different, if 
George could have honestly trusted the sincere words 
in which his proud servant took his last farewell. 



CHAPTER XI 

DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 

Chatham was by fixed principle a Whig of the old 
school, a firm believer in the Settlement of 1689, 
albeit alien to any particular Whig "connection." 
His whole conception of politics was the efficient rule 
of a trained statesman, implicitly trusted by a free 
Parliament. Thus it came about that, when not in 
power himself, he was in continual opposition to 
forces which he scorned, but could not control — a 
venal and servile House of Commons; a House of 
Peers divided into rival " factions " ; a King and his 
Court, successfully intriguing so as to manipulate both. 
Chatham's splendid efforts to bridle Prerogative, to 
guide Parliament, and to stir the conscience of the 
nation, met with no success, but they left a great 
inheritance to those who came after him. 

On the first occasion of his return to Parliament, 
Chatham poured out his passionate sense of constitu- 
tional right with even more than his usual violence 
of language. 

" My Lords, I need not look abroad for grievances. The 
great capital mischief is fixed at home. It corrupts the very 
foundation of our political existence, and preys upon the 

206 



chap, xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 207 

vitals of the State. The Constitution at this moment stands 
violated. Until that wound be healed, until the grievance 
be redressed, it is in vain to recommend union to Parliament, 
in vain to promote concord among the people. If we mean 
seriously to unite the nation within itself, we must convince 
them that their complaints are regarded, that their injuries 
shall be redressed. On that foundation, I would take the lead 
in recommending peace and harmony to the people. On any 
other, I would never wish to see them united again. If the 
breach in the Constitution be effectually repaired, the people 
will of themselves return to a state of tranquillity. If not — 
may discord prevail for ever ! " 

The orator went on, apparently losing control of 
his tongue, to the effect that if the King's servants 
would not permit a constitutional question to be 
decided by the principles of the Constitution, then, 
old as he was, he hoped to see the issue fairly tried 
between the people and the government. When the 
liberty of the subject was invaded, without redress, 
resistance was justified. "The Constitution has its 
political Bible, by which, if it be fairly consulted, 
every political question may, and ought to be deter- 
mined. Magna Charta, the Petition of Eights, and 
the Bill of Eights, form that code which I call TJie 
Bible of the English Constitution. Had some of his 
Majesty's unhappy predecessors trusted less to the 
comments of their ministers, had they been better 
read in the text itself, the glorious Eevolution would 
have remained only possible in theory, and would not 
now have existed upon record, a formidable example 
to their successors." If Walpole said truly, " it was 
not his style to be harsh in the closet," his style was 
outspoken enough in the Lords. 

In the same speech Chatham went on to expound 



208 CHATHAM [chap. 

his view of a Eeform of Parliament. The boroughs, 
he said, had been called the rotten parts of the 
Constitution. Corrupt as they are, they must be 
considered as the natural infirmity of the Constitution. 
He was not prepared to abolish them. The limb was 
mortified, but amputation might be death [the orator 
forgot that to leave the mortified limb would be 
equally death]. His plan was to increase the county 
representation, which was still pure and uncorrupted. 
He urged the increase of another member to each 
county, both in England and in Scotland. He thought 
that increase would be " the only security against 
the profligacy of the times, the corruption of the 
people, and the ambition of the Crown." How utterly 
inadequate this reform would prove, in the immense 
preponderance over counties and large towns of the 
rotten boroughs, we know now. But it was sixty 
years before the nation succeeded in carrying any 
reform at all. 

Over and over again Chatham perorated in the 
Peers about the discontents in the nation, the irrita- 
tion produced by the conduct of the ministers of the 
Crown, and of the " influence behind the Crown," in 
which he insisted on believing. His doctrine was 
that manifest discontent in the nation was sufficient 
ground for urgent action, that the Peers were the 
hereditary advisers of the Crown, that it was a 
pressing crisis which called them to be united, and to 
make their common counsel reach the throne, in spite 
of the efforts of the open and the concealed evil 
counsellors at Court. 

" It was the duty of that House to inquire into the causes 



xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 209 

of that notorious dissatisfaction expressed by the whole 
English nation, to state these causes to their Sovereign, and 
then to give him their best advice in what manner he ought 
to act. The privileges of the House of Peers, however trans- 
cendent, however appropriated to them, stood, in fact, upon 
the broad bottom of the people." 

". . . Let us be cautious how we admit an idea that our 
rights stand on a footing different from those of the people. 
Let us be cautious how we invade the liberties of our fellow- 
subjects, however near, however remote: for be assured, my 
Lords, that in whatever part of the Empire you suffer slavery to 
be established, whether it be in America, or in Ireland, or here 
at home, you will find it a disease which spreads by contact, and 
soon reaches from the extremities to the heart. The man who 
has lost his own freedom becomes from that moment an 
instrument in the hands of an ambitious prince, to destroy 
the freedom of others. The liberty of the subject is invaded 
not only in provinces, but here at home. The English people 
are loud in their complaints, they complain with one voice 
the injuries they have received ; they demand redress, and 
depend upon it, my Lords, that one way or other they will 
have redress. They will never return to a state of tranquillity 
until they are redressed ; nor ought they ; for in my judg- 
ment, my Lords, and I speak it boldly, it were better for them 
to perish in a glorious contention for their rights, than to 
purchase a slavish tranquillity at the expense of a single iota 
of the Constitution." 

How radically different was all this, both in substance 
and in form, from the language of Walpole, or of 
Burke, or even of Charles Fox. It was the language 
of Pym, of Somers, of Eussell, of Brougham, and of 
Bright. It was in this that Chatham was the precursor 
of the advanced reformers of the nineteenth century, 
as he was the heir of the revolutionist leaders of the 
seventeenth century. Chatham was a real, and not a 
pinchbeck, Imperialist, as he was, I think, the first to 



210 CHATHAM [chap. 

use habitually the term Empire in its true sense. To him, 
all men within the dominions of the Crown, of what- 
ever colour and under whatever sun, were subjects of 
the King, and equally entitled to freedom. To him 
oppression, injustice, and violation of law, wherever 
done, were wrongs done to the nation as a whole, 
outrages which put their own liberties in peril. To 
him, good government and justice were paramount 
needs for every citizen, whether they were threatened 
in Ireland, in Scotland, in England, in America, or in 
India. Chatham never countenanced the view that 
" Empire " meant small colonies of white settlers, 
holding in serfdom vast masses of some inferior 
race. 
y It was this conception of the solidarity of interests, 
as we might now say, which caused him to fling him- 
self with such energy and with such persistence into 
the miserable series of squabbles about Wilkes and 
the Middlesex election. Chatham loathed and despised 
Wilkes as a man and as an agitator, and he always 
haughtily refused to interfere in any election. But in 
the matter of Wilkes being incapacitated for election 
by resolution of one House — the Commons declaring 
elected a candidate whom the electors had rejected — 
Chatham saw an illegal and unconstitutional attack on 
the rights of every elector in the kingdom. And on 
behalf of the principle of free representation of the 
people, he vehemently and persistently repudiated 
the action of the servile House of Commons under the 
influence of an arrogant King and his creatures. There 
can be no use in going into the details of the trumpery 
Middlesex election debates. Chatham from first to 



xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 211 

last upheld common sense, law, and wise policy. His 
view of the constitutional questions was entirely sound, 
was soon afterwards accepted by both parties, and is 
now settled law. In maintaining it, he confronted 
and overwhelmed not only the feeble spokesmen of 
the Court and the Government, sundry able and 
irresolute peers, but the weighty learning of Lord 
Mansfield himself. Mansfield was undoubtedly one of 
the most consummate lawyers in our history, as well 
as one of the subtlest and most persuasive logicians. 
But he was a coward, given to intrigue, always the 
advocate, and never the statesman. When Chatham 
denounced the act of the Commons in attempting to 
incapacitate Wilkes from being elected, and moved an 
amendment in the Lords to declare that they thereby 
"deprived the electors of Middlesex of their free 
choice of a representative/' Mansfield made a powerful 
reply. From the point of view of strict constitutional 
law, Mansfield was right; and his speech is a classical 
exposition of the doctrine. He spoke as a judge rather 
than a peer. He insisted that the House of Commons 
had done illegal things in the matter of general 
warrants, which the judges could and did redress. In 
the matter of expelling Wilkes, in rejecting Wilkes's 
re-election to Middlesex, whether they had acted with 
wisdom, or indiscretion — and on this he, Mansfield, 
would never express what he thought as a peer — there 
was no court of law which could decide the question ; 
much less could the House of Lords decide it. Both 
Houses were the sole courts of justice for their own 
rules and resolutions. Bight or wrong, it was not for 
the other House to correct them. 



212 CHATHAM [chap. 

In all this, Mansfield spoke as the great lawyer he 
was. It was no doubt irregular, and perhaps impolitic 
at the moment, for Chatham to raise a formal amend- 
ment with Wilkes's name in it, and to force a division 
in the Lords. Mansfield and the large majority of the 
House were technically right in refusing to bring their 
own House of Peers into direct collision with the 
House of Commons. But it would be pedantic to regret 
that Chatham should have used the opportunity of 
his seat among the Peers to express in noble and 
passionate words the folly, the lawlessness, and the 
servility of the Commons in truckling to the Court. 
And in the Commons itself Lord Granby, Sir George 
Savile, and Burke used the same language as Chatham 
and Camden, the Lord Chancellor, had used in the 
Lords. Walpole once wrote : " When Lord Mansfield 
was silent, as his fears now made him, Chatham was 
far superior to all his other adversaries; they were 
babies to Mm." 

In this debate of 3rd January 1770, Chatham pro- 
mised his hearty co-operation with Lord Rockingham. 
Whatever there had been in the past, " cordial union," 
he said, was now " indissoluble " — not in order to share 
the sweets of office, but to save the State. Would that 
it could have been maintained! Lord Eockingham 
and his friends were honest, just, sensible men, guided 
by one man of splendid genius. Eockingham himself 
was over-cautious, inarticulate, proud, reserved, and 
commonplace. Shelburne, the ablest of Chatham's 
friends, was deeply distrusted as self-interested, dis- 
loyal, and insincere. Burke, with all his genius, was, 
and felt himself to be, a follower, not a leader ; he was 



xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 213 

satirical, touchy, jealous; too subtle and doctrinaire 
for a great statesman. Chatham was an effervescent 
man of action, magnanimous and profoundly clear- 
visioned, but fiercely impatient of the moderation and 
niceties of the theorists. In the result Chatham, 
Rockingham, Shelburne, and Burke sought the same 
ends in somewhat similar ways; but they failed to 
form an " indissoluble union," and too often suspected 
and thwarted each other. 

Time after time Chatham returned to the struggle 
over the Middlesex election. He supported George 
Grenville's Bill for trying controverted elections. In 
May 1770, he brought in a Bill " for reversing the 
adjudications of the House of Commons " in the case 
of Wilkes and Colonel Luttrell. It is obvious that 
such a Bill, suggested to him by Lord Mansfield, 
perhaps in derision, was brutum fulmen, except as it 
enabled Chatham to make a great speech. And a 
great and fierce speech he made. "A corrupt House 
of Commons invert all law and order." " A majority 
in that House becomes a minister's state-engine, to 
effect the worst of purposes, and to produce such 
monstrous and unconstitutional acts, one cannot help 
exclaiming in the language of Shakespeare — 

"'Fie on it ! Oh fie ! 

'Tis an unweeded garden, things 

Rank and gross in nature possess it merely.' " 

He hoped his Majesty would soon open his eyes. 
"He esteemed the King in his personal capacity, and 
he revered him in his political one." Four days after- 
wards, he moved again that the advice given to his 



214 CHATHAM [chap. 

Majesty (when he answered the address of the City of 
London) was " of a most dangerous tendency." Ten 
days later he moved an address to the Throne to 
dissolve Parliament. As might have been foreseen, 
all of these motions were negatived by large majorities. 

"Purity of Parliament is the corner-stone in the 
commonwealth " ; to secure it was needed " a more 
full and equal representation," was the keynote of 
Chatham's reply to the City of London's address, as it 
was of his own conduct in Parliament. Again, in 
November in the same year, 1770, he returned to 
the Middlesex election in a fresh attack on Lord 
Mansfield, whose direction to the Jury in the famous 
libel case of printing Junius's 35th Letter, To the 
King, Chatham challenged. Mansfield's ruling was 
upheld by the judges, but met with violent criticism 
and public indignation until the point was settled by 
Fox's Libel Act in 1792, which declared that juries 
were entitled to bring in a general verdict of " guilty " 
or " not guilty " upon the whole question submitted to 
them. Thus after twenty-two years this famous 
controversy was settled by legislation, in the sense 
which Chatham had vainly struggled to maintain 
against the lawyers of his age. 

Again he called for a dissolution, an appeal to the 
nation to decide the right, if one branch of the 
legislature could usurp the power to invade the liberty 
of the subject. The House of Commons, he said, had 
become odious to the present age, and their memory 
would be detested by posterity. He inveighed against 
the practice of modern judges to reserve to the bench 
the exclusive right to decide what constituted a libel. 



xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 215 

" The matter of libel — of public libel — was generally a 
political matter; and the question, whether a paper 
was a libel or not, was not a question of law, but a 
question of politics, in which ministers indulged their 
passion of revenge, and the courts of law became their 
instruments of gratification." Mansfield made a feeble 
and dilatory plea, in effect declined to reply. And in 
December, Chatham followed up the attack with even 
greater personal bitterness. 

He now challenged the course taken by Lord 
Mansfield in the trial, boldly affirming that in his 
decision he had gone out of his legal limits, and had 
travelled out of the record, by introducing statements 
which he volunteered to give, but which were not 
properly in evidence. Chatham declared that "the 
conduct of the noble judge was irregular, extrajudicial, 
and unprecedented " — nay more, that his real motive 
for doing what he knew to be wrong was to take the 
opportunity of telling the public extrajudicially that 
three other judges agreed with him in the doctrine he 
had laid down. Whether Lord Mansfield could have 
successfully repelled this fierce attack, he made no 
attempt to do so, and Chatham's friends and Junius 
asserted that he was cowed and conscious of wrong. 
A furious pamphlet duel was waged between Nerva 
for Mansfield and Phalaris for Chatham. 

In the following year, when the foolish government 
of Lord North, with his servile majority in the House 
of Commons, were dragged into their futile struggle 
with the printers of their debates, and then with the 
City of London ; and had committed to the Tower the 
Lord Mayor, Brass Crosby, and Alderman Oliver, on 



216 CHATHAM [chap. 

the question of privilege, Chatham again returned 
to the charge. The report of his speech runs 
thus : — 

" He entered largely into the consideration of the state of 
the country ; the depraved system of government, which had, 
in a very few years, reduced us from a most flourishing to a 
most miserable condition. He went through the whole pro- 
ceedings of the House of Commons in the late business of the 
Printers, and arraigned every part of it in the strongest terms. 
He warmly defended the City magistrates in the conscientious 
discharge of their duty, for the House, in committing them to 
prison without hearing their defence on the question of privi- 
lege, had been guilty of a gross and palpable act of tyranny ; 
that they had heard the prostituted electors of Shoreham in 
defence of an agreement to sell a borough by auction, and 
had refused to hear the Lord Mayor of London in defence of 
the laws of England; that their expunging, by force, the 
entry of a recognizance, was the act of a mob, not of a Parlia- 
ment ; that their daring to assume a power of stopping all 
prosecutions by their vote, struck at once at the whole system 
of the laws ; that it was solely to the measures of the govern- 
ment, equally violent and absurd, that Mr. Wilkes owed all 
his importance ; that the King's ministers, supported by the 
slavish concurrence of the House of Commons, had made him 
a person of the greatest consequence in the kingdom ; that they 
had made him an Alderman of the City of London, and 
representative of the County of Middlesex ; and now they will 
make him Sheriff, and in due course, Lord Mayor of London ; 
that the proceedings of the House of Commons in regard to 
this gentleman, made the very name of Parliament ridicu- 
lous." " To save the institution from contempt, this House 
must be dissolved. To resist the enormous influence of the 
Crown, some stronger barriers must be erected." And he now 
declared himself a convert to triennial Parliaments — which till 
now he had opposed. In May 1771, he moved an address to 
the King to dissolve Parliament "to compose " this alarming 
warfare, which may endanger the Constitution and tend to 
shake the tranquillity of the kingdom. 



xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 217 

This motion, like all the others, was promptly 
negatived, and came to nothing. But every word he 
had uttered was true. Every principle he affirmed has 
been accepted and is now the law and practice of the 
Constitution. Chatham in this, as in so many things, 
was two or three generations before his age. His 
forecasts were somewhat premature, however just and 
wise. He told Lord Buchan — " before the end of this 
century, either the Parliament will reform itself from 
within, or be reformed with a vengeance from with- 
out." It would be an error to belittle the importance 
of this famous brawl, owing to the vile character of 
Wilkes or the ineptitude of the King and his creatures. 
It was really the birth of the freedom of the Press and 
the influence of political criticism on the conduct of 
government. 

At every point Chatham strove to resist the growing 
prerogative of the Crown and the increasing degrada- 
tion of the Commons. As to the " Nabobs " he cried 
out — " the riches of Asia have been poured in upon 
us, and have brought with them not only Asiatic 
luxury, but Asiatic principles of government. With- 
out connections, without any natural interest in the 
soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their 
way into Parliament, by such a torrent of private 
corruption, as no private hereditary fortune can re- 
sist." He persisted in affirming the secret influence 
of Lord Bute, though the quondam Favourite was 
then abroad. And when the Duke of Grafton told 
him that these suspicions were " the effects of a dis- 
tempered mind brooding over its own discontents," 
he angrily retorted that his disease had never inca- 



218 CHATHAM [chap. 

pacitated him so as to forsake his principles. This 
was no doubt true: the quarrel was a melancholy 
outburst on both sides. Chatham, nominally First 
Minister, found, on recovering his health, that the 
ministry under the feeble or indolent leading of 
Grafton, had allowed all the measures decided on 
before his retirement to be not only neglected but 
reversed. Chatham in his wrath suspected that 
Grafton had been in collusion with Bute. The truth 
was this. Bute had nothing to do with it. Grafton 
was not in collusion with any one ; but he was un- 
stable, easy, and inert. The only secret influence was 
that of George himself, whose grasping and dogged 
nature made him the evil genius of his age. 

On the civil list debate Chatham inveighed against 
any attempt to conceal the expenditure from Parlia- 
ment. The late good old King, he said, was sincere, 
and allowed you to know " whether he liked you or 
disliked you." Now, George in., it must be allowed, 
was elaborately gracious to Chatham in person, but 
at heart was his bitter enemy. " I will trust no 
Sovereign in the world," said Chatham, " with the 
means of purchasing the liberties of the people. Does 
he mean, by drawing the purse-strings of his subjects, 
to spread corruption through the people, to procure 
a Parliament, like a packed jury, ready to acquit his 
ministers at all adventures ? " Chatham was certainly 
sincere enough outside the royal closet, and allowed 
King or subject to know " whether he trusted you or 
distrusted you ! " Never did he speak truer word 
than when he wrote that " he was resolved to be in 
earnest for the public, and should be a scarecrow of 



xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 219 

violence to the gentle warblers of the grove, the mod- 
erate Whigs and temperate statesmen." 

Eockingham and his friends were honest and honour- 
able men — so were they all, all honourable men — but 
" that moderation, moderation I was the burden of the song 
among the body." That was the root difference between 
Chatham and the Rockingham connection. Eocking- 
ham was at best a very " moderate Whig." Burke for 
the present was also a moderate Whig, though in his 
heart of hearts a passionate Tory, and in his inmost 
brain ever a keen Conservative. Chatham was a 
passionate Whig of the " Glorious Ee volution " : con- 
stantly breaking out to be " a scarecrow of violence," 
by design rather than intemperance. It is this which 
explains the incompatibility that ever kept Chatham 
and Burke asunder. Burke's grand essay in 1770, 
Thoughts on the Present Discontents, with all its wisdom 
and eloquence, was a partisan defence of the feeble and 
commonplace rule of Eockingham, and an oblique 
censure on Chatham and his friends, who were endea- 
vouring to form a united party. Chatham was quite 
right when he wrote to Eockingham that the essay 
had done harm to the cause. And Burke was quite 
wrong — ignobly and petulantly wrong — when, twenty 
years afterwards, he called this "a knavish letter." 
It was a temperate and sensible reply to a criticism 
which was ill-timed as well as unjust. It was unworthy 
of Burke to justify the well-meaning Eockingham at 
the expense of the high-souled Chatham. 

Though the state of Parliament and the Constitution 
mainly absorbed Chatham's energy on his return to 
public life, he entered with keenness into the questions 



220 CHATHAM [chap. 

of foreign policy. France had purchased from Genoa 
the island of Corsica during Chatham's retirement. In 
his speech in 1770 he expressed his regret in these 
words: — "France has obtained a more useful and 
important acquisition in one pacific campaign, than in 
any of her belligerent campaigns. It is too much the 
temper of this country to be insensible of the approach 
of danger, until it comes upon us with accumulated 
terror." Nor is it too fanciful to speculate that if 
Chatham had retained his power and his health for 
but another year, Napoleon would not have been a 
Frenchman, for Chatham never would have suffered 
Corsica to pass to France. 

But a far more stirring incident roused him two 
years afterwards in the affair of the seizure by Spain 
of the Falkland Islands. Peace was unbroken, and 
ministers and the nation suspected no attack, when 
Chatham, in urging an increase in the number of 
seamen, broke forth in a prophetic outburst : — "I pledge 
myself that, at this very hour, a blow of hostility has 
been struck against us by our old inveterate enemies 
in some quarter of the world." He had in truth 
divined that the efforts made by Choiseul in France, 
and by Grimaldi in Spain, to restore their navies, and 
to overthrow the maritime ascendency of Britain, were 
about to result in some overt act. Some months after- 
wards the country was roused to fury by the news that 
a Spanish armament had seized the Falkland Islands, 
lying one hundred leagues east of the Straits of Magellan, 
and had expelled a weak British force then in possession. 
These distant islands had been alternately claimed and 
occupied by Spaniards, French, and British. But the 



xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 221 

forcible ejection of a British governor, with, his small 
military and naval detachment, was more than the 
English people could endure. War with Spain was 
thought to be inevitable. All eyes turned to Chatham. 
The crisis roused him to all his old fire. The nation 
hung upon his words ; and he poured forth one of his 
most masterly orations on the international relations 
and the maritime problems of the Empire. 

We may at this time neglect the violence with which 
Chatham stormed against the ignorance, neglect, and 
treachery of the ministers who had reduced the country 
to a condition as deplorable at home as it was despic- 
able abroad. Nor can we take seriously his denuncia- 
tions of the meanness and craftiness of the Spaniards, 
the cunning of their merchants and their officers, and 
even the bad faith of the King of Spain, who dis- 
owned the thief, and profits by the theft, as a common 
" receiver of stolen goods." He then broke forth into 
the famous appeal : — 

" Let us have peace, my Lords, but let it be honourable, let 
it be secure. A patched-up peace will not do — by which a war 
may be deferred, but cannot be avoided. ... I know the 
strength and preparation of the House of Bourbon ; I know 
the defenceless, unprepared condition of this country. ... I 
will tell these young ministers the true source of intelligence. 
It is sagacity. Sagacity to compare causes and effects ; to 
judge the present state of things, and discern the future by a 
careful review of the past. Oliver Cromwell, who astonished 
mankind by his intelligence, did not derive it from spies in 
every cabinet in Europe ; he drew it from the cabinet of his 
own sagacious mind. He observed facts and traced them 
forward to their consequences. From what was, he concluded 
what must be, and he never was deceived. ... In the late 
war we had 85,000 seamen employed. We now have but 



222 CHATHAM [chap. 

16,000, and it is now proposed to raise this to 25,000. But 
the forty ships of the line, now to be commissioned, with their 
frigates, will require 40,000 seamen. . . . Permit me now to 
state the extent and variety of the service to be provided." 
" The first great and acknowledged object of national defence, 
in this country, is to maintain such a superior naval force at 
home, that even the united fleets of France and Spain may 
never be masters of the Channel. If that should ever happen, 
what is there to hinder their landing in Ireland, or even upon 
our own coasts? . . . The second naval object with an English 
minister should be to maintain at all times a powerful Western 
squadron. In the prof oundest peace it should be respectable ; 
in war it should be formidable. Without it, the colonies, the 
commerce, the navigation of Great Britain, lie at the mercy of 
the House of Bourbon. 

" The third object indispensable is to maintain such a force in 
the Bay of Gibraltar as may be sufficient to cover that garrison, 
to watch the motions of the Spaniards, and to keep open the 
communication with Minorca. At this hour, he said, there 
were but eleven ships ready equipped for the defence of the 
Channel, one ship at Jamaica, one at the Leeward Islands, 
and one at Gibraltar ; and if these places were attacked, they 
must fall." " When the defence of Great Britain or Ireland is 
in question, it is no longer a point of honour ; it is not the 
security of foreign commerce, or foreign possessions ; we are 
to contend for the very being of the state." " If the House of 
Bourbon make a wise and vigorous use of the actual advantages 
they have over us, it is more than probable that on this day 
month we may not be a nation." "When I compare the 
numbers of our people, estimated highly at seven millions, 
with the population of France and Spain, usually computed 
at twenty-five millions, I see a clear self-evident impossibility 
for this country to contend with the united power of the 
House of Bourbon, merely upon the strength of its own 
resources. They who talk of confining a great war to naval 
operations only, speak without knowledge or experience. 
We can no more command the disposition than the events 
of a war. Wherever we are attacked, there we must 
defend." 



xi.] DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION 223 

He then turned to defend the alliance with Frederick 
of Prussia — "that wonderful man whose talents do 
honour to human nature." Alliances with German 
princes might be not only useful, but necessary. But 
before all things we had to look to the internal condi- 
tion of this country. We might look abroad for 
wealth, or triumphs, or luxury; but England is the 
main stay, the last resort of the whole Empire. 
" Could it be expected that Englishmen would unite 
heartily in defence of a government by which they 
feel themselves insulted and oppressed ? Eestore them 
to their rights; that was the way to make them 
unanimous. It is not a ceremonious recommendation 
from the Throne, that can bring back peace and harmony 
to a discontented people. That insipid annual opiate 
has been administered so long that it has lost its effect. 
Something substantial, something effectual must be 
done." 

He closed with a furious invective against the men 
in the City of London " who live in riot and luxury 
upon the plunder of the ignorant, the innocent, the 
helpless — the miserable jobbers of 'Change Alley, or 
the lofty Asiatic plunderers of Leadenhall Street — the 
monied interest, that blood-sucker, that muck-worm, 
which calls itself the friend of government — that 
advances money to government, and takes special 
care of its own emoluments — the whole race of com- 
missaries, jobbers, contractors, clothiers, and remitters 
— not the honest industrious tradesman or the fair mer- 
chant — who are the prime source of national wealth." 
He protested that he could never again be a minister : 
that a strong ministry was needed : it must be popular 



224 CHATHAM [chap. xi. 

— not founded on any family connection. Those now 
in office were balancing between a war that they 
ought to have foreseen, and for which they had made 
no provision, and an ignominious compromise. He 
warned them of their danger. If they were forced 
into war they stand at the hazard of their heads. If 
they made an ignominious compromise, let them con- 
sider if they would be able to walk the streets in 
safety. 

Louis xv. shrank from war. Spain gave way, and 
restored the island. It was soon afterwards abandoned, 
and has been recovered within recent years. It was 
said at the time that " Chatham's very name would 
prevent war." Perhaps his speech did. This speech 
of Chatham's was the occasion of Dr. Johnson's famous 
reply that it was " the feudal gabble of a man who is 
every day lessening that splendour of character which 
once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and 
afterwards influenced it." An apt summary of the 
hostile view of Chatham's career. 



CHAPTEE XII 

DEFENCE OF AMERICA 

At last a man arose whose deeds spoke for him, the frag- 
ments of whose eloquence were passed far and wide from 
mouth to ear, and did not lose the stamp of their quality in 
the carrying. With his broad heart, his swift perception, 
and his capacious intellect, Chatham knew America, and he 
loved her ; and he was known and loved by her in return. 
He had done more for her than any ruler had done for any 
country since William the Silent saved and made Holland; 
and she repaid him with a true loyalty. When the evil day 
came, it was to Chatham that she looked for the good offices 
which might avert an appeal to arms. When hostilities 
had broken out, she fixed on him her hopes of an honourable 
peace. And when he died — in the very act of confessing 
her wrongs, though of repudiating and condemning the 
establishment of that national independence on which her 
own mind was by thai time irrevocably set — she refused to 
allow that she had anything to forgive him, and mourned 
for him as a father of her people. 

In these words the latest historian of the American 
Revolution — Sir George Trevelyan ? himself both states- 
man and historian, one of a family of statesmen and 
historians — sums up the last years of Chatham's career. 
These years were in many ways the grandest of his 
life. He stood alone without a party or a group be- 
hind him. He was continually disabled by disease, and 
forced to withdraw for long periods together. He had 
against him prejudice and apathy in the ruling class; 
q 225 



226 CHATHAM [chap. 

overwhelming majorities in Parliament; insolent, 
blind, unscrupulous ministers; an arrogant bigot on 
the throne. Against such opposition he could not 
change, he could scarcely affect, the course of events. 
But in public and in private he poured out his indig- 
nation, his appeals to reason and to justice, his despair. 
He touched the hearts and brains of all the finer spirits 
of the age; he roused a generous sympathy in the 
American people; and he did much to mitigate the 
bitterness which they not unnaturally felt, and long 
have continued to nourish, against the nation of their 
oppressors. 

When George Grenville proposed his Stamp Act of 
1765, Chatham was ill in bed, and remained for that 
year absent from Parliament. "When the Stamp Act 
was repealed in the following year it had been mainly 
by the indignant appeal of Chatham, who " rejoiced 
that America had resisted" When Townshend in 1768 
carried his fatal law to tax colonial imports, Chatham 
was not only prostrate and absent, but unable to know 
what was being passed. His just indignation broke 
forth in public and in private, when he returned to 
political action, and found the irreparable mischief 
which had been done under cover of his own name. 

" America sits heavy upon my mind," he wrote to 
Lord Shelburne. Again he wrote on the Boston Tea 
outrage : " I am extremely anxious about the measures 
now depending, with regard to America, and I con- 
sider the fate of Old England as being at stake, not 
less than that of the New." He thought compensation 
should, and would, be offered for the violent destruc- 
tion of the East Indian Company's tea cargo. " Perhaps 



xii.] DEFENCE OE AMERICA 227 

a fatal desire to take advantage of this guilty tumult 
of the Bostonians, in order to crush the spirit of 
liberty among the Americans in general, has taken 
possession of the heart of the government. If that 
mad and cruel measure should be pushed, one need 
not be a prophet to say, England has seen her best 
days." " America disfranchised, and her charter 
mutilated, may, I forebode, resist; and the cause 
become general on that vast continent. If this 
happen, England is no more, how big words soever 
the sovereign in his parliament of Great Britain may 
utter." 

He wrote to the Sheriff of London in 1774 : " What 
infatuation and cruelty to accelerate the sad moment 
of war ! Every step on the side of government, in 
America, seems calculated to drive the Americans into 
open resistance, vainly hoping to crush the spirit of 
liberty, in that vast continent, at one successful blow ; 
but millions must perish there before the seeds of free- 
dom will cease to grow and spread in so favourable a 
soil ; and in the meantime devoted England must sink 
herself, under the ruins of her own foolish and in- 
human system of destruction." " Maryland cannot 
wear chains ! Would to Heaven it were equally plain 
that the oppressor, England, is not doomed, one day, 
to bind them round her own hands, and wear them 
patiently!" He rejoices in " the manly wisdom and 
calm resolution " of the Declaration of Eights by the 
American Congress, and will not believe that " free- 
men in England can wish to see three millions of 
Englishmen slaves in America." 

To Chatham from first to last this was a Civil War, 



228 CHATHAM [chap. 

of peculiar peril and injustice. He clearly divined 
the issue. He did not overrate the infatuation of the 
Court party, nor the indomitable forces they were 
about to engage. He no doubt did estimate too 
strongly the dangers to English liberty and the 
ruinous consequences to our country of the inevitable 
defeat. The condition of Britain after the surrender 
of York Town was indeed humiliating. But the fore- 
bodings of Chatham as to the decline of his country 
and the establishment of a despotism at home were 
hardly verified. Lecky, Trevelyan, and our recent 
historians have all drawn attention to the fears of the 
Whig Leaders, that the expulsion of the King's forces 
from the United States would mean the decadence of 
our country and the ruin of the Constitution. But 
Chatham's conviction of the wrong and the danger 
of the war was shared to the full by Burke and by 
Eockingham, by Charles Fox, by Lord Shelburne, and 
the Duke of Eichmond. 

It was not till May 1774 that Chatham again 
appeared in Parliament. Disaffection and riot in 
New England was now breaking out into war. He 
made an impassioned protest against any taxation 
of the Colonists, and against the methods of military 
coercion by which the taxation was being enforced. 
He called " Taxation, that father of American 
Sedition." 

" My Lords, I am an old man, and would advise the noble 
Lords in office to adopt a more gentle mode of governing 
America ; for the day is not far distant, when America may 
vie with these Kingdoms, not only in arms, but in arts also." 
" This has always been my received and unalterable opinion, 
and I will carry it to my grave, that this country has no right 



xii.] DEFENCE OF AMERICA 229 

under Heaven to tax America. It is contrary to all the 
principles of justice and civil policy, which neither the exi- 
gencies of the State, nor even an acquiescence in the taxes, 
could justify upon any occasion whatever." 

In 1775 Chatham entered into close relations 
with Benjamin Franklin, the delegate from the 
American Colonies ; and he publicly introduced him 
to the House of Lords, when he himself moved an 
address to the King to withdraw the troops from 
Boston. He stoutly maintained the right, the duty 
of the people of America, to resist. He derided the 
feeble means by which coercion was attempted to be 
enforced. With all his warmest love for the British 
troops, he said, their situation was truly unworthy; 
penned up, pining in inglorious inactivity. They 
were an army of impotence — an army of impotence 
and contempt; but to make the folly equal to the 
disgrace, they were an army of irritation and vexation. 
All attempts to impose servitude on such men, to 
establish despotism over such a mighty continental 
nation, must be vain, must be fatal. " We shall be 
forced ultimately to retreat ; let us retreat while we can, 
not when we must. We must necessarily undo these 
violent oppressive acts : they must be repealed — you 
will repeal them ; I pledge myself for it, that you will 
in the end repeal them ; I stake my reputation on it : 
I will consent to be taken for an idiot, if they are not 
finally repealed. Avoid, then, this humiliating dis- 
graceful necessity." Every motive of justice and of 
policy, of dignity and of prudence, he continued, urged 
them to allay the ferment in America by withdrawing 
the troops from Boston, by repealing the Acts. Every 



230 CHATHAM [chap. 

danger and every hazard impended to deter them from 
perseverance in their ruinous measures, foreign war 
hanging over their heads by a slight and brittle 
thread — France and Spain watching their conduct and 
waiting for the maturity of their errors. 

He followed this up by a complicated Declaratory 
Bill, which he prepared in conference with Franklin, 
but which it is needless to set forth in detail. It 
would not have sufficed to content the Americans, and 
it was perhaps designed as a subject for discussion 
rather than legislation. It was summarily rejected by 
the Lords, though the Duke of Cumberland voted in 
the minority of thirty-two. On 4th July 1776 the 
Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, which 
caused renewed excitement in England, and a revul- 
sion of popular feeling to continue the war. Chatham 
was not carried away by this shock, but he was unable 
to speak in public. During the whole of the year 
1776 he was retained in the country by disease. It 
was not until May 1777 that he again appeared in Par- 
liament. He came wrapped in flannels, and supported 
upon crutches. He said : — 

" The gathering storm might break ; it has already opened 
and in part burst. If an end be not put to this war, there is 
an end to this country. America has carried us through four 
wars, and will now carry us to our death, if things were not 
taken in time. You may ravage — you cannot conquer ; it is 
impossible : you cannot conquer the Americans. I might as 
well talk of driving them before me with this crutch ! " 

In October 1777 General Burgoyne surrendered his 
whole army prisoners of war. Before the news 
reached this country, Chatham made another impas- 



xii.] DEFENCE OF AMERICA 231 

sioned appeal against measures which had reduced this 
late flourishing Empire to ruin and contempt. 

"Not only the power and strength of the country are wast- 
ing away and expiring; but her well-earned glories, her true 
honour, her substantial dignity, are sacrificed. France has 
insulted you ; she has encouraged and sustained America ; and 
whether America be wrong or right, the dignity of this country 
ought to spurn the officious insult of French interference. As 
to conquest, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, 
and every effort, still more extravagantly ; pile and accumulate 
every assistance you can buy or borrow ; traffic and barter 
with every pitiful little German prince, that sells and sends his 
subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince ; your efforts are 
for ever vain and impotent — doubly so for this mercenary aid 
on which you rely ; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, 
the minds of your enemies to overrun them with the mercenary 
sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions 
to the rapacity of hireling cruelty ! If I were an American, as 
I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my 
country, I never would lay down my arms — never — never — 
never ! Your own army is infected with the contagion of these 
illiberal allies. The spirit of plunder and of rapine is gone 
forth among them. Who is the man that has dared to autho- 
rise as associate to our armies the tomahawk and scalping- 
knif e of the savage ? To call into civilised alliance the wild 
and inhuman savage of the woods ; to delegate to the merciless 
Indian the defence of disputed rights, and to wage the horrors 
of his barbarous war against our brethren ? These enormities 
cry aloud for redress and punishment: unless thoroughly done 
away, it will be a stain on the national character — it is a viola- 
tion of the Constitution — I believe it is against law. It is not 
the least of our national misfortunes, that the strength and 
character of our army are thus impaired : infected with the 
mercenary spirit of robbery and rapine — familiarised to the 
horrid scenes of savage cruelty, it can no longer boast of 
the noble and generous principles which dignify a soldier ; no 
longer sympathise with the dignity of the royal banner, nor 
feel the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, that 



232 CHATHAM [chap. 

make ' ambition virtue ' ! What makes ambition virtue ? — -the 
sense of honour. But is the sense of honour consistent with 
the spirit of plunder, or the practice of murder ? Can it flow 
from mercenary motives, or can it prompt to cruel deeds ? 
Besides these murderers and plunderers, let me ask our minis- 
ters — w T hat other allies have they acquired? What other 
powers have they associated with their cause ? Have they 
entered into alliance with the King of the Gypsies ? Nothing is 
too low or too ludicrous to be consistent with their counsels." 

Lord Suffolk rose and defended the employment of 
Indians, that it was justifiable to use " all the means 
that God and Nature put into our hands." This roused 
Chatham to the famous retort. He could not repress 
his indignation : — 

"I know not what ideas that Lord may entertain of God 
and nature ; but I know that such abominable principles are 
equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What ! to 
attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the mas- 
sacres of the Indian scalping-knife — to the cannibal savage 
torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating ; literally, eating 
the mangled victims of his barbarous battles I "... " These 
abominable principles, and this more abominable avowal of 
them, demand the most decisive indignation. I call upon that 
Right Reverend Bench, those holy ministers of the Gospel, and 
pious pastors of our Church ; I conjure them to join in the 
holy work, and vindicate the religion of their God : I appeal to 
the wisdom and the law of this learned Bench to defend and 
support the justice of their country : I call upon the Bishops 
to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn, — upon the 
learned judges to interpose the purity of their ermine, to save 
us from this pollution : — I call upon the honour of your Lord- 
ships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors and to maintain 
your own : I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country 
to vindicate the national character : — I invoke the genius of the 
Constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the 
immortal ancestor of this noble Lord [Thomas Howard, first 
Earl of Suffolk] frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his 



xii.] DEFENCE OF AMERICA 233 

country. In vain he led your victorious fleets against the 
boasted Armada of Spain ; in vain he defended and established 
the honour, the liberties, the religion, the Protestant religion 
of this country against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and 
the Inquisition, if these more than popish cruelties and inquisi- 
torial practices are let loose among us ; to turn forth into our 
settlements, among our ancient connections, friends, and rela- 
tions, the merciless cannibal, thirsting for the blood of man, 
woman, and child — to send forth the infidel savage — against 
whom ? against your Protestant brethren ; to lay waste their 
country, to desolate their dwellings and extirpate their race 
and name, with these horrible hell-hounds of savage war ! " . . . 
" I call upon your Lordships, and the united powers of the 
State, to stamp on this awful subject an indelible stigma of the 
public abhorrence. I implore those holy prelates of our 
religion, to do away these iniquities from among us. Let them 
perform a lustration ; let them purify this House and this 
country from this sin ; I am old and weak, and at present 
unable to say more ; but my feelings and indignation were too 
strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in 
my bed, nor reposed my head on my pillow, without giving 
this vent to my eternal abhorrence of such preposterous and 
enormous principles." 

A few weeks later Chatham supported the Duke of 
Richmond's inquiry into the state of the nation, in 
which he reviewed the perilous condition of the 
country. When the news of Burgoyne's surrender 
came at the end of 1777, he defended the general and 
his army, and justly declared them to have " been 
sacrificed to the ignorance, temerity, and incapacity of 
ministers." He revived his protest against the use of 
Indians — " a pollution of our national character ; a 
stigma which all the waters of the Delaware and 
Hudson would never wash away." He challenged 
the ministers to recall the mercenaries and to disband 
the savages — to withdraw our troops entirely. On 



234 CHATHAM [chap. 

the motion for an adjournment of the House for six 
weeks, he again spoke on 11th December 1777. He 
insisted that the hereditary Council of the nation 
should not take holiday when the nation was in 
mourning. Nay more, it was in imminent peril — 
"Safe no longer than its enemies think proper to 
permit." He reviewed the state of our naval and 
military defences, and exposed their weakness. " They 
told you in the beginning, that 15,000 men would 
traverse America, with scarcely the appearance of 
interruption. Two campaigns have passed since they 
gave us this assurance ; treble that number has been 
employed ; and one of your armies, which composed 
two-thirds of the force by which America was to be 
subdued, has been totally destroyed, and is now led 
captive through those provinces you call rebellious. 
Those men whom you called cowards, poltroons, 
runaways and knaves, are become victorious over your 
veteran troops ; and, in the midst of victory and the 
flush of conquest, have set ministers an example of 
moderation and magnanimity." 

With the year 1778 the state of the nation was 
darker than ever. The King and his ministers 
doggedly persisted in the war. Troops could neither 
be raised nor hired. France allied itself with the 
Americans, and George declared war with France. 
England had not a friend left. Her troops were 
prisoners or blockaded in America. Her credit was 
exhausted. Her fleet was unprepared ; and she had 
reason to fear attack from the united navies of France 
and of Spain. In this terrible hour of peril there was 
one man to whom all thoughts turned. Lord North, 



xii.] DEFENCE OF AMERICA 235 

who had long carried on this war against his own 
conviction and had just declared the conquest of 
America to be impossible, implored the King to accept 
his own resignation and send for Chatham. Bute, the 
quondam favourite, said Chatham was indispensable. 
Mansfield, his inveterate enemy, said that without 
him the ship would founder. Camden, Eockingham, 
Burke, Richmond joined in the universal cry — send 
for Chatham. 

Against all this George resisted with the dogged- 
ness of a brute rather than of a monarch. He would 
never see Chatham: he would lose his crown but 
never would accept the Opposition. He would allow 
North to call in Chatham as a subordinate, but the 
cast and policy of the administration should not be 
changed. Lecky calls this the most criminal act in 
the whole reign of George in., as criminal as any act 
of Charles i. Whatever the chances might have been, 
it was too late. Chatham himself was at death's door. 
The possibilities of any reconciliation or settlement 
with America short of absolute separation were now at 
an end. Even the magic of Chatham's name, and even 
his genius at its zenith, now could have effected 
nothing in the way of compromise. A French alliance 
had bound the Americans to the common interest. A 
French war had roused the national pride of Britons, 
when it was seen that the Empire was about to be 
broken up by the arms of their hereditary foe. 

To this humiliation Chatham would not stoop. To 
the American people, whom he loved and honoured, 
he would concede everything. But to have America, 
which he had rescued from France, again torn away 



236 CHATHAM [chap. 

from us by the rival whom he had crushed — this 
was a sacrifice to which he could not submit. His old 
dread and jealousy of the House of Bourbon, which 
had become almost a monomania with him, blazed up 
with all its ancient fire. In this, the ardent patriot 
extinguished in him the far-seeing statesman. We 
can see to-day how far passion had misled him. Burke, 
Bockingham, Fox, the Duke of Bichmond — some of the 
best brains of the Whig party — urged the immediate 
recognition of American independence. Chatham died 
in the act of protesting against it. And a cloud hung 
over the sun of his renown as he sank to rest. 

On the 7th of April 1778, the Duke of Bichmond 
moved an address to the Crown in the sense of their 
group. Feeble as he was, in his seventieth year, 
racked with pain, Chatham struggled at the hazard of 
his life to attend and speak. He was led into the 
House by his son William Pitt, the future statesman, 
and his son-in-law, Lord Mahon. He was dressed in 
black velvet, and covered to the knees in flannel. 
Within his large wig little more of his countenance was 
seen than his aquiline nose and his eye, which retained 
its native fire. We are told, " He looked like a dying 
man, yet never was seen a figure of more dignity : he 
appeared like a being of a superior species." The 
Lords stood u±j and made a lane for him to pass. He 
bowed as ne went on. Presently he rose slowly with 
the aid of his crutches and the two young men. He 
raised his head, and looking to Heaven he said — 

" I thank God that I have been enabled to come here this 
day to perform my duty. I am old aod infirm — have one 
foot, more than one foot in the grave — I have risen from my 



xii.] DEFENCE OF AMERICA 237 

bed, to stand up in the cause of my country — perhaps never 
again to speak in this House." 

The stillness of the House was most touching. He 
continued to describe all the evils, the crimes, and the 
follies of the American war. 

" My Lords," he broke forth, " I rejoice that the grave has 
not closed upon me ; that I am still alive to lift up my voice 
against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble 
monarchy ! Shall this great kingdom now fall prostrate 
before the House of Bourbon ? If we must fall, let us fall 
like men ! " 

The Duke of Eichmond replied with cool sense to 
show the hopelessness of a war by Britain in her 
present forlorn state against the united forces of 
France, Spain, and America. He told the orator that 
even he would now find himself in impossible condi- 
tions. Chatham seemed roused and indignant. He 
struggled to his feet, and essayed to stand. Then he 
pressed his hand upon his heart and fell in convulsions. 
The peers near caught him in their arms. The House 
was cleared : he was carried to Downing Street, and 
shortly afterwards to his home at Hayes. On the 
11th of May he died there in peace, surrounded by his 
wife and his children. 



APPENDIX 

The most dramatic death in English history, except that of 
Nelson, produced a profound impression on the nation. A 
public funeral was ordered by Parliament in Westminster 
Abbey, with a huge and somewhat pompous monument. 
The ceremony was attended by Burke, Rockingham, Rich- 
mond, Shelburne, Camden, and other Whig chiefs. The chief 
mourner was William Pitt, then but nineteen, for the eldest 
son was serving with his regiment in Gibraltar. The House 
of Commons voted £20,000 to pay debts, and £4000 a year to 
successors in the title. The City of London in vain asked to 
have the funeral in St. Paul's. They contented themselves 
with the cenotaph in the Guildhall, for which Burke com- 
posed a sonorous homily. In the national collections are a 
portrait after Brompton, the picture by Copley representing 
the seizure in the House of Lords, and the statue in St. 
Stephen's Hall. In private collections are busts and portraits ; 
and no public man has been more faithfully recorded. 

The private and domestic life of Chatham is one of un- 
broken dignity and charm. In all his relations to his wife 
and children we find a nature pure, generous, and affectionate. 
His letters are too often dry and stiff ; but they breathe 
within a conventional cover love, thoughtfulness, and tender 
hopes. One cannot estimate how much the opponent of 
Napoleon owed to his father's watchful^raining and incessant 
zeal. The noble letters in which Chatham consigned his first- 
born to his military superiors, and again when he withdrew 
him from his commission, rather than suffer him to fight 
Americans, are as fine as those when at last he sent him away 
again to the army, on the outbreak of war with France. 

238 



APPENDIX 239 

" Go, my son, whither your country calls you, spare not a 
moment weeping over an old man ! " Lady Chatham herself 
stands forth as one of the most pathetic, graceful, and loving- 
women recorded in the Memoirs. She survived her husband 
twenty-five years, and was laid beside him in the Abbey, 
having witnessed the successes of her famous son. 



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etc., etc. With many illustrations. 

Cloth 8vo $2.00 net 

" It is written from the heart. It breathes sincerity and conviction in every 
line. It emphasizes not so much the forces and influences which lifted Theodore 
Roosevelt to the presidency, as the qualities that make his personality and 
underlie his character. It gives a vivid impression of his mental and moral self 
— his point of view, and the ideals on which his public career has been based. . . . 
It is a refreshing and stimulating picture — one that will carry encouragement to 
every reader whose heart is enlisted in the struggle to exorcise corruption and 
oppression from our body politic." — New York Tribune. 



ROBERT MORRIS: Patriot and Financier 

By Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Ph.D. With portraits, fac- 
similes, and other illustrations. Cloth 8vo $3.00 net 

" Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer's J Robert Morris, Patriot and Financier,' is a 
fascinating history of this great life, so rich in its contributions to the cause of 
independence, so pathetic in its inglorious end. Without Robert Morris, Wash- 
ington could not have saved the desperate cause of the colonies. His courage, 
boundless resources, and firmness in times of public vacillation, were the salva- 
tion of the revolutionary army. A vivid picture of the difficulties under which 
he labored is presented by Mr. Oberholtzer by selections from Morris's diaries and 
letters showing the incessant calls for money from creditors of the government 
and from the army. . . . The historian has done his work well, and new light 
is thrown on this chapter in revolutionary annals by his researches." 

— The World To-day. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



BISMARCK: Some Secret Pages of his 
History- 
Being a Diary kept by Dr. Moritz Busch during twenty-five 
years' official and private intercourse with the great chancellor. 
With portraits. 

Two volumes Cloth 8vo $10.00 net 

" Whether the great German Chancellor left memoirs is uncertain; he began 
them, but whether he completed them is unknown ; even if such documents exist 
in manuscript, it is extremely doubtful whether they will see the light, at least 
for some years to come. Meanwhile we have a substitute for them in the two 
capacious volumes published by The Macmillan Company. . . . The Prince, 
indeed, may be said to have been a collaborateur with Dr. Busch in the prepara- 
tion of the earliest manuscript for the press." — New York Sun. 



THE LIFE OF WILLIAM EWART 
GLADSTONE 

By the Rt. Hon. John Morley, M.P., D.C.L., LL.D, author 
of " Edmund Burke," " On Compromise," etc., etc. With 
numerous photogravure portraits and other illustrations. 

Three volumes 8vo $10.50 net per set 

" Gladstone has certainly found his real biographer in Mr. Morley, his sup- 
porter in English politics and public affairs from first to last. All available 
sources of information, private and public, have been drawn upon in the making 
of these three volumes, which form the ' official ' life of the statesman, never to be 
superseded, however opinions may hereafter diverge from facts." 

— New York Mail and Express. 

" That, as a whole, the work is extremely interesting goes without saying. 
It is written with sympathy, insight, and knowledge." — New York Herald. 



THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON I. Including 

New Materials from the British Official Records 

By J. H. Rose, M.A., author of "The Revolutionary and 
Napoleonic Era, 1 789-181 5," etc. With many illustrations. 
Two volumes Cloth 8vo $4.00 net per set 

" Mr. Rose's book shows the traditional English feeling toward Napoleon. 
Indeed, this traditional feeling is analyzed by him, and he arrives at very much 
the same conclusion as did Wellington, who is said to have declared that ' Napo- 
leon was not a gentleman.' Mr. Rose thinks that English interest in him will 
always be pathological in its nature; that he was morally and intellectually, too, 
a monster, such as probably the world will never see again, and never ought to 
see." — New York Commercial Advertiser. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



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